Setting:
The setting of “The Handmaid’s Tale starts in the Republic of Gilead, a country called which replaced the United States, in the current era. Gilead is a run by an controlling and theocratic government whose focus is to return to "conventional principles" by instituting oppressive methods against women, minorities and political rebels. Due to environmental deprivation, many men and women have become infertile. This then, resulted in certain women being chosen as “handmaids” to conceive children with the country’s most elite Commanders. The setting is very fast paced. Starting in a gymnasium, and the football field; then it changes to her very scarce room she lives in. She goes on walks to town with her partner Ofglen; they pass the cemetery, church or river. Offred then, unexpectedly leaves with the birthmobile to rush to Commander Warrens home for the birth of his child. The scene then changes from a vivid birth scene to a vigorous night prowl of Commander Fred’s parlour. She then is called to the master’s private quarters and enters a scrabble tournament. After being surprised to receive a showgirl’s outfit, Offred is whisked away to Jezebel’s into a setting that, by Gilead’s standards, no longer exists. The “meat market” bar scene, jerks Offred into the past-time games of flirtation, temptation, seduction, and compliance. Things pick up and change; from her lonesome room upstairs, she escapes the extend heat of summer and lurks to the kitchen with Serena Joy and outside to Nick’s quarters. To Offred's remorseful dismay, the secret sessions with the chauffeur draw her into repeated rendezvous’. Like a sample of doom, a ringing bell commands Offred and the rest of the female population to a salvaging; she proceeds to her room in an irrational state with the need to clean her hands of death, intense hunger and crying. Ofglen has escaped arrest by killing herself; overwhelmed by the violation of Gilead's power, Offred is just commencing to calm herself when she come across Serena and the incriminating sequined costume, proof that Offred and the Commander have disobeyed Gilead's controlled mating ceremony. At night, Offred contemplates her choices, ranging from fire and murder to a plea for mercy, to flight to a distressed suicide. In the last rapid scene, Nick and two “Eye” escorts rush her down the stairs, and into the van; which could lead her to freedom or a hook on the Wall.
Major Characters
Offred: This is the narrator and innermost character of the novel. In the Republic of Gilead, Offred is a Handmaid. Handmaids are prolific women forced to produce children for the elite, sterile couples; fertility is infrequent and extremely valued in Gilead. Offred has one year left to have a child before she is determined infertile and sent to the Colonies. Offred has been detached from her family and friends and lives a rigorously subdued lifestyle. Her emotional state exchanges between revolt, acceptance, bitterness, and anguish. However, she keeps faith, eventually escapes and records her story.
Aunt Lydia: The dictatorial head mistress of the Red Center, where the Handmaids are held with rules they must live by. Aunt Lydia is the prime representative for the principles of Gilead in the novel. Parts Aunt Lydia’s speeches up rise all throughout Offred's commentary. Aunt Lydia is callously manipulative under the semblance of goodness and concern.
Moira: Offred's disobedient, bisexual friend that she has known since college, before Gilead was formed. Moira is sent to the Red Center along with Offred. She is a feminist and has a fondness for making vulgar jokes. She escapes the Red Center, but is detained before she can break out of the country and is then sent to work at Jezebel's. Moira symbolizes power and hope for Offred but, when they last convene at Jezebel's, Offred is worried that Moira may have lost her courage.
Serena Joy: The Commander’s wife, sang gospel music on television, and was an anti-feminist advocate before the war and development of Gilead. In Gilead, she is required to take on the submissive role of a housewife. She resents Offred because, her presence is an indication to Serena's failure to make children, which is the purpose of a women's life in Gilead beliefs. She is also envious of the sexual connection Offred must have with her husband, although this feeling is intolerable by law. The subdued relationship between Offred and Serena Joy points toward the failure of the government to construct cookie-cutter women for different female roles.
Ofglen: Offred's shopping partner who is also a Handmaid. Ofglen and Offred are careful to appear perfectly devout to each other when they first meet. Months later, the two become freer to share their uncertainties, views, and desires with each other. Ofglen tells Offred she belongs to a secret, rebellious society and tries to get Offred to get information from the Commander's study. Offred is too afraid to participate and Ofglen hangs herself when government spies discover her anti-government activities.
Commander: Offred's sterile mate and one of the founding fathers of Gilead. The Commander belongs to the proclaiming elite, but appears to grip onto certain parts of life before Gilead. He completes his lawful responsibilities within his household, but does so without conviction. He has a large collection of taboo items from the time before Gilead, and he commences an unconventional relationship with Offred. His views of women are naive and paradoxical.
Minor Characters
Janine: A Handmaid who is predominantly susceptible to emotional manipulation. Janine appears to completely implement to the beliefs of Gilead even though she breaks down psychologically and physically during the process. She is trusted by the Aunts but disliked and sympathized by all the Handmaids.
Rita: Is a servant in the Commander’s home. She is one of the Marthas, who are infertile, but have done nothing to classify themsleves as Unwomenly. She loathes the Handmaids and fears her superiors.
Cora: Another servant in the Commander’s home. She is also a Martha. She empathizes with Offred and hopes Offred will have a child.
Nick: The Commander's chauffer as well as a double agent in the elite, government agency of spies called Eyes. Nick is a member of the underground rebel group called the Maydays. Serena Joy sets up an illegal tryst between Offred and Nick for the purpose of producing a child. Offred and Nick continue to see each other secretly. When Nick believes her to be in danger, he arranges her escape.
Offred's daughter: The child Offred had with her husband, Luke, before Gilead. She was given away to another family when Offred was arrested and forced into service as a Handmaid. Offred is tormented by thoughts of her daughter and communication between them is impossible; Offred feels as though she has been erased.
Luke: Offred's husband. Luke was married when they met and started their relationship; he divorced his wife and married Offred. They try to escape Gilead, but are caught and detained; the two never see each other again and she feels guilty when she begins her relationship with Nick.
Aunt Elizabeth: One of the headmistresses at the Red Center. Aunt Elizabeth was threatened and tied up by Moira, who used her outfit and identification to escape the Red Center.
Professor Pieixoto: The speaker at a seminar described in the epilogue to The Handmaid's Tale. Professor Pieixoto explains his efforts at confirming the tale as a historical document.
Objects/Places
Handmaids' Outfit:
The Handmaids outfit is generally red. The dress is cut discreetly and gloves are often worn with it. A white, winged bonnet escorts the outfit; the bonnet restricts a Handmaid's vision and is frequently worn with a veil.
Pornography:
Offred's mother partakes in an exhibition against pornography. As a child, Offred is not offended by a pornographic picture she sees at the display. Pornography is willingly obtainable in traveling vans and franchised stores in the pre-Gilead United States. The Handmaids are exposed to pornographic films at the Red Center to express the horrors inflicted on women in the pre-Gilead society.
The Wall:
Gilead has distorted a previous university into a reformatory organized by their secret police, the “Eyes” of God. Nonconformists are executed and hung on the outer walls of the university as a forewarning to the people of Gilead of the penalty for profanation.
Winged Eye:
This is a symbol used by the”Eyes” of Gilead. It is materialized upon their black vans, which carry the supremacy of fear in Gilead. The Eyes are always watching for heretical behavior, and callously root out unbelievers in the philosophy of Gilead.
Knife:
Offred repeatedly describes her craving for knives as well as shears. Handmaids are methodically deprived of the access to knives and sharp objects. One of Serena's key occupations is cutting the flowers in her garden. Offred illustrates her as cutting off the plants sexual organs.
Baby Angela:
Janine is the only Handmaid in the novel to become pregnant. All other Handmaids are very jealous of her and at the birthing of baby Angela, various Handmaids are present. They all experience compassionate birth paroxysms. When the baby is born she is immediately taken away from Janine by the Wives and named Angela. We later find out that the baby dies and Janine blames herself for its death because its father was not her Commander.
Flowers:
Offred depicts flowers in detail numerous times in the novel. Red tulips like empty chalices thrust themselves up in Serena's yard only to explode and whither. Often times, Offred describes the modern Handmaid as an empty chalice as well. One evening, Offred sneaks downstairs to steal a daffodil as a means of compensation for her lack of power in almost every vicinity her of life. Later, Offred describes irises as rebellious and sexual, silently persistent. Serena cuts off the sexual organs of the plants to permit the bulbs to store power.
Soul Scrolls:
These are machines that print out and mechanically voice standard prayers. Wives pay to have these prayers printed because it is considered virtuous to do so. The Soul Scrolls remind Offred of Tibetan prayer wheels, although Offred and Ofglen do not believe God hears these prayers.
Conflicts
Patriarchy
Defined as the structuring of society where a male figure has authority and responsibility over an organisation or institution. Patriarchy subsists in more or less all cultures, and the female form, matriarchy, is alleged to only exist as a theoretical social system, as it is not manifested in any civilizations. The Republic of Gilead is formed on the basis of patriarchy. Women are not sanctioned to work in any vocations, have no access to their money, and are deprived of of all rights. They carry out domestic roles, according to certain factors:
Wives: Highest social level obtainable to women. Married to the superior men, and have no domestic responsibilities.
Daughters: Natural or adopted daughters of the wives and commanders; will later become wives, because of their social standing.
Handmaids: Fertile women, whose communal duty is to produce children for the wives. Handmaids are fashioned by brainwashing fertile women who have committed a gender crime.
Aunts: Older women, who train handmaids. Carry out the dirty work for the men of Gilead, in order to avoid being sent to the colonies.
Marthas: Older, infertile women, whose comparatively submissive nature and household skills guarantee them a life of domestic servitude. Econowives: Married to lower class men. They are expected to carry out all female functions such as domestic work, child bearing and companionship.
The men hold roles of authority and overrule the women in every aspect of life. The men of Gilead are categorised into the following:
Commanders: Highest class and entitled to a patriarchal household, consisting of a Wife, Martha and Handmaid.
The Eyes: The Inner intelligence agency that uses thought control and control through fear to maintain order.
Angels: The soldiers who fight to protect and manifest the Republic’s borders.
Guardians: Used for tedious functions; are disabled, old or young men, who can later become Angels.
~All major accountability is given to the males, with females powerless to acquire weapons, or hold any kind of significant authority. “No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns.”
“When there’s meat they cut it up for me ahead of time, as if I’m lacking manual skills or teeth. I have both, however. That’s why I’m not allowed a knife.”
~Women are lawfully classified as the possessions of men. Handmaids belong to their commanders, as do Marthas.
~Removal of women’s individual names eliminates their independence and character.
~Offred’s affair with Luke, a so called ‘gender crime’ is the ultimate means for her mission to handmaid status. Luke, Offred and the child attempt to flee to Canada, but are captured and separated. The child’s destiny is unidentified for the majority of the novel, however we later learn that Serena Joy has always known of the child’s whereabouts and afterwards shows Offred a picture of her daughter.
~The Republic of Gilead controls its residents through means of trepidation and thought control, having manipulated the citizens to live in fear of what may happen to them, if they execute any crimes. The Wall works to instil fear in those who view it as it is corporal verification of the consequences of ‘resisting the system’ and contradicting the norms in the Republic of Gilead.
“We’re supposed to look: that is what they are there for, hanging on the Wall.”
~The Eyes are the internal intelligence agency in Gilead, that works to maintain law and order through the use of fear. The members of the agency are unknown to ordinary citizens. Offred believes Nick to be an Eye, due to his winking at her, which she deems to be a test of her loyalty to the Republic.
“Then he winks.. He’s taken a risk, but for what?.. Perhaps it was a test, to see what I would do. Perhaps he is an Eye.”
~The apprehension of the unknown is also used to control the citizens, mainly the women, into staying loyal to the Republic. Infertility and various ‘gender crimes’ such as extra-marital affairs can lead to women, especially handmaids, as being dubbed ‘unwomen’ and sent to the colonies. The colonies implement a sense of striking fear on handmaids as well as homosexuals, feminists and political rebels from the time before, who resist the new republic. Although no concrete evidence exist about life inside the colonies, it is evident that unwomen are not capable of social assimilation and are discarded from society, and forced to die a slow death in areas of high pollution, like former radiation sites.
MAJOR CONFLICT
The Republic of Gilead has dominated over women and concentrated Handmaids like Offred into sexual slavery. Offred wants contentment and liberty, and finds herself struggling against the totalitarian restrictions of her society.
LITERARY DEVICES:
~“We would exchange remedies and try to outdo each other in the recital of our physical miseries; gently we would complain, our voices soft and minor key and mournful as pigeons in the eaves troughs.” “His skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.” – SIMILE
~ “The camera moves to the sky, where hundreds of balloons rise, trailing their strings: red balloons, with a circle painted on them, a circle with a stem like the stem of an apple, the stem of a cross.” –SYMBOLISM
~ “In the curved hallway mirror, I flit past, a red shape at the edge of my own field of vision, a wraith of red smoke.” “As for us, any real illness, anything lingering, weakening, a loss of flesh or appetite, a fall of hair, a failure of the glands, would be terminal.” – ALLITERATION
~ “I am, I am, I am, still.” “Night falls. Or has fallen. Why is it that night falls, instead of rising, like the dawn?” – REPETITION
~ “My God. Who Art in the Kingdom of Heaven, which is within.” “’Blessed be the fruit,’” she says to me, the accepted greeting among us.” – PARODY
~ “I would not be able to stand it, I know that; Moira was right about me. I'll say anything they like, I'll incriminate anyone. It's true, the first scream, whimper even, and I'll turn to jelly, I'll confess to any crime, I'll end up hanging from a hook on the Wall.” - evoke Winston's submission to Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984. “But the frown isn't personal: it's the red dress she disapproves of, and what it stands for.” Parallel to the shunning of Hester Prynne, who wears the red A in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. – LITERARY ALLUSION
Major Themes
Power
One of the key themes of “The Handmaid's Tale” is the presence and exploitation of power. On one hand, Gilead is a theocratic autocracy, so power is obligatory entirely from the top. There is no option of appeal, no method of officially shielding oneself from the government, and no hope that an exterior authority will interfere. One of the distinctive characteristics of this kind of power is that it is tremendously visible. Power forced from one route must always be portrayed. Unlike a democratic society, where the people approve of who is governing and have a curiosity in upholding the configuration of society, in Gilead, the government must plaster the streets and homes with guards and guns. The likelihood of surveillance must be stable.
Sexuality
The focus of the Gileadean administration is on the management of sex and sexuality. They eradicate the homosexuals; demolish pornography and sexual clothing; they murder abortionists; forbid divorce and second marriages; and they ritualize bizarre sexual relations that they deem supported by the Bible. It was not very shocking to find out at the end of the novel that the Gileadean establishment ultimately destroyed itself. The Gileadean regime is apparently right to apprehend sexuality, to the point where illegitimate sexual practices undermine the government quickly becomes clear. The Commander divulges that he carried out many affairs with his Handmaids, but that there is a relatively "secret" club where higher-ups ensemble with women exclusively for sexual purposes. These actions demonstrate that the government cannot obliterate prohibited sexual acts merely by threatening petrified punishments.
Gender Conflict
Offred becomes supplementary aware that as a man, Luke is on one side of the new establishment, and she is on another, regardless of the fact that she thinks he loves her. The Commander attempts to clarify to Offred why the new regime is better for men, and fundamentally confesses that in order for it to be better for men, it must be worse for women. In the novel, the idea of whether the gender conflict exists at all is a bit unclear; it doesn’t seem as though there is actually more conflict between men and women than between women and women or men and men. Although there is some dialogue of the relationships between men in “The Handmaid's Tale”, relationships between women are not inevitably greater to those between women and men. Offred come across herself disputing with her mother and Moira about those very things. The different categories of women following the regime alter servely only to widen gaps between women. Some wives literally try to stab Handmaids to death, angry about their very existence, while perfectly aware that they can do nothing about it. Generaly, relationships between men and women are not revealed in an even slightly optimistic way. The only exception would be the relationship between Offred and Nick, but really, the potency of that relationship rests in Nick's capitulation of his own wellbeing in order to be with and help Offred.
QUESTIONS:
~What happened to Luke and their daughter? Is there still hope that their alive?
~Does Offred escape freely or does she eventually get caught again?
~Why does the Commander go against the rules of Gilead and take things further with, not just Offred but many of his Handmaids?
~Does Offred ever see her family and friends again?
~Why do the needs of the society triumph over the rights of the individual?
~How does Gilead construct and use a new terminology to support its totalitarian order?
~Why is reading dangerous and restricted from the characters in the novel?
Sunday, March 27, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale Précis
Gorman Beauchamp believes Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to be an exaggeration of a dystopia. Atwood is making too much of something so little, her novel is more of an entertainment than a concern. Beauchamp compares the novel in terms of seriousness and pure fantasy; he concludes that the book belongs to a genre called dystopia, this is a genre that projects an imaginary society that differentiates from the authors own, first, by being considerably worse in important respects and, secondly, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Just like that of Nineteen Eighty-Four, this novels potency as a possible and fearful future significantly refused with the decline of the old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. Beauchamp states that there is little to fear on the totalitarian theme within these two novels, this is because it is not plausible; maybe in third world countries of today but not American. Take for example how America sells what they have to give to the poor and thus, the creation of a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a plausible scenario that stirs anxiety. Recollecting in The Handmaid’s Tale, the purpose of a dystopia is not accurate prediction, but effect prophylaxis (the prevention of disease): the Dystopist, the author that is, wants to provide a self-defeating prophecy. It can be assuredly concluded that Atwood contains no desire to prove an oracle (prophecy); assuming, however, that her purpose is purely towards entertainment. Beauchamp renders that the historical analogues prove Atwood’s scenario, not implausible but a more crucial question would become: Could it happen here? Atwood states that she didn’t include anything in her book that hasn’t already happened or that was not underway somewhere: perhaps, somewhere, like Iran or Romania, but the United States? Not very likely. Atwood is sending a very strong message in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, but is it really a serious enough phenomenon to send the sort of frisson (an almost pleasurable sensation of fright) to reads as dystopia should? This novel sets out to frighten us of the future; much like the Gothic romance of the 8th century or slasher movies, this book serves to scare people silly; “there is a joy in fear”. The excitement of fear is what draws people to watch or read such things. The failure to engage the dynamics of ideological revolution of any stripe; with the exception of the Aunts, not many people in Gilead seem to be true believers of the revolution. Take Serena Joy for instance, she violates many of the the rules in small ways – like smoking black market cigarettes and scheming to get Offred impregnated by a chauffeur. The Commander is also another who does not follow all of the regulations of Gilead, by the conducting of his forbidden liaison with his handmaid, obviously relishing at his “sins”. In conclusion, The Handmaid’s Tale is really nothing more than “a jolly good yarn” that shares all the same nonsense of fate: absolute historical improbability.
The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale
The Midwest Quarterly 51.1 (Autumn 2009): p.11(15). (4651 words)
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Author(s): Gorman Beauchamp.
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COPYRIGHT 2009 Pittsburg State University - Midwest Quarterly
In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?'" Such were the reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times , to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale . The British response is the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings . Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, the source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale.
Read "seriously" (in contrast to pure fantasy), the book belongs to the genre called the dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Science fiction works like Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up , while offering decidedly negative images of the future, are not truly dystopian because they lack an anti-utopian animus; Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World , by contrast, serve as paradigms of the genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from the implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to the political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, the dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather the bearing of those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of. Another tradition of utopias, however, depends on revelation rather than on reason, on some divine injunction or leading from above, in which case they are usually theocracies, regimes ruled by a priestly class whose authority rests in the will and word of God. Giliad--the futuristic society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale --is Atwood's dystopic projection of such a theocracy, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
Aldous Huxley has argued that "whatever its artistic or philosophic qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true." That is to say, the conviction or force that such projections convey depends on real-world conditions or, at least, on the perception of these conditions; consequently, as these conditions or perceptions change, so will the vatic force of the fictive projections. Powerful as Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in many ways, its potency as a possible and fearful future significantly declined with the decline of the old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. With the collapse of the Evil Empires of Orwell's day, the specter of Ingsoc no longer haunts Europe or the world. As long ago as 1958, in Brave New World Revisited , Huxley noted that "recent developments in Russia . . . have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude" and argued, correctly, that "the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than something like 1984 " looming in our future. We have, in other words, little cause to fear a future that does not seem a plausible extrapolation of current conditions. An America, for example, whose super rich convert to Christianity, sell all they have to give to the poor, and thus create a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a scenario that arouses much anxiety.
The question, then, that I want to consider is the plausibility, in light of current conditions, of the future depicted in The Handmaid's Tale . We ought, however, first recall that the purpose of a dystopia is not accurate prediction, but effective prophylaxis: the dystopist, that is, wants to offer a self-defeating prophecy. The media frenzy in and around 1984 over Nineteen Eighty-Four as prediction almost invariably missed the point that Orwell did not want to describe accurately a totalitarian future, but to forestall one. The less "right" he was, the better job he had done. Similarly, we may safely conclude that Atwood has no desire to prove an oracle; assuming, however, that her purpose is more than merely to entertain ("jolly good yarn"), the minatory force of her tale will depend on the effectiveness of her extrapolation from real and present dangers in today's society. Trueness to the future is thus not the crucial criterion of a dystopian vision, but trueness to the present, paradoxically, is.
Atwood's Giliad exists in the near future, not just within the lifetime of her protagonist Offred (or June) but within the span of her childbearing years. Less than a decade, seemingly, separates the Giliadian future from the (more or less) present, the world we know. Is so cataclysmic a social revolution occurring so abruptly plausible? Atwood has adduced the example of Iran under the ayatollahs as an instance of a society's performing such an abrupt volte-face ; and, indeed, the speed with which Iran retook the veil lends credence to her fictive scenario. Twentieth-century history offers other apt analogues. Could the boyars of Russia, in the summer of 1914, have imagined the epic transformation that the guns of August would inaugurate? Could a normal citizen of Weimar Germany in, say, 1929 have even begun to conceive what his nation would be like a decade later? "It is," Orwell wrote in 1940, "as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries . . . have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as masters of the world." Indeed, could any of us, only a few years ago, have predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire--so swiftly, so totally, so bloodlessly--and the momentous social transformations that followed in its wake? A sort of historical Doppler Effect seems to have developed where rapid and radical change appears to be the most dependable constant of our time. The once seemingly irreversible trend toward ever greater internationalism has foundered on the rocks of renewed nationalism, and even nationalism itself confronts the disintegrating forces of ethnic and religious tribalism. Not only are the Balkans being rebalkanized, so is much of the rest of the world. What Atwood projects, then, is the sort of cataclysmic upheaval that the rest of the world has experienced happening here and happening as the result of the same sort of disintegrating religious tribalism. The former United States is, in this scenario, a patchwork of warring satrapies, of which Giliad is but one, the area once known as New England.
Given, then, that historical analogues render Atwood's scenario not altogether implausible, the more crucial question (echoing the title of Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel on a similar theme) becomes: Can it happen here ? Atwood stated that she did not include anything in The Handmaid's Tale "that had not already happened or was not underway somewhere": perhaps so--somewhere--in Iran or Romania or East Timor, but in the United States? Even in this, one of the darkest and most retrograde periods of our nation's history? Is there, that is, any legitimate plausibility to her future and, therefore, any real force in her warning? When Atwood wrote the tale in 1985, the religious right was riding high, the result largely of tent revivalism's having discovered cable television. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority--both now defunct--were receiving a lot of media attention; Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker had blubbered their way to a bizarre sort of celebrity; and the pre-masturbating-a-hooker-in-a-motel-room-revelation Jimmy Swaggert offered a nightly spectacle of evangelical rapture equaled in authenticity only by his peers in the World Wrestling Federation. All their grotesquerie appeared to many observers as the goofy-face of a serious sociological phenomenon, the coalescence of evangelical Christians--the lumpen-born-again--into a sizable and significant voting bloc. On this premise, Pat Robertson in 1988 mounted a campaign for President--that went nowhere. Nevertheless, the Religious Right seems to have established a permanent caucus in the Republican Party, where it pretty much writes party platform every four years and enjoys a veto over presidential candidates. It claims--and is claimed to have defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, has spearheaded jihads against legalized abortion, gay rights, and the mainstream media and, in general, served as God's PAC on earth. The fervor and tenor of the Religious Right can well be gauged by Pat Robertson's characterization of feminism as "a socialistic, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
The phenomenon, then, that Atwood extrapolates into Giliad--an intolerant, totalitarianoid fundamentalism, intent on culture war--obviously exists here and now; but is it really a serious enough phenomenon to send the sort of frisson down the spine that a dystopia should? I think not. Nineteen Eighty-Four frightened because there was a Stalin in the Kremlin and a Beria at Lubianka: consequently, as real-world totalitarianism receded, so did the dread produced by the fictive intensification of it in Oceania. Because technology more than polities informs Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World and Vonnegut's Player Piano --or, more precisely, a polities generated by advanced technology--and because the potential for a techno-tyranny remains quite plausible, these dystopias retain much of their minatory power. Compared to the cataclysmic totalitarian threats of yore (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao) or the continuing techno-totalitarian threat, a neo-theocracy on the banks of the Charles inspires little fear as a plausible future. While admiring the imagination and artistry of The Handmaid's Tale , I find it wants to frighten us too much about too little.
When I suggested something along these lines to a class studying the book, I was surprised by the intensity of some students' objections to what I had said. With abortion clinics being bombed and gays being bashed, with Roe v. Wade hanging by a thread and Clarence Thomas recently ensconced on the Supreme Court--my example is of that vintage--with the forces of reaction infiltrating school boards and Intelligent Design being taught as science, my reservations were taken by the politically correctest among them to be ostrich-like at best and, at worst, objectively fascist, as old-line Marxists used to say. It was helpfully suggested that blindness like mine was exactly what had allowed Hitler to come to power. What, I protested, about all my Bush jokes? My small but very sincere contribution to People for the American Way? My support for the Dixie Chicks? Did these count for nothing in establishing my lefty-prof bona fides ? Nothing. If I was too obtuse to see that Giliad lurked just around the corner, then I probably also believed that Oswald shot Kennedy and "just say no" really worked. Clearly, I thought, my class was stoned--Oliver Stoned. But when later, untutored by this experience, I presented the same argument at an academic conference liberally sprinkled with feminists, the reaction was even more virulent--as I had no gradebook to brandish against the assault. Only an imperceptive and/or evil running dog of the status quo would have any but words of praise and thanks for Ms. Atwood's timely warning.
These experiences confirmed one of my suspicions: the dystopia serves for a certain kind of reader much the same function that the Gothic romance served for the eighteenth century or that slasher movies serve for the pubescenti today: to scare them silly. As one nineteenth-century poet sang in praise of Gothic terrors, "there is a joy in fear." The joy in fear that explains the appeal of horror stories probably also explains the appeal of the dystopia, an ideological horror story. My students, I realized, and my fellow conference goers of a certain persuasion wanted to be scared --scared by the specter of a shadowy cabal of rightwing zealots spreading its secret tentacles everywhere, just as earlier they had wanted to be scared by Freddie Kruger or Pinhead. The Nightmare on Elm Street and the nightmare in Room 101 have much the same psycho-aesthetic appeal: "there is a joy in fear." Thus, in minimizing the dangers that The Handmaid's Tale maximizes, I was literally acting as a killjoy, throwing warm water on them, so to speak. It was a critical approach not greatly welcome in class or at conference.
But I was not done. Atwood's tale, I went on to suggest, had other weaknesses in verisimilitude. One of these struck me when, early in the novel, in a casual bit of dialogue, there is mention that the armed forces of Giliad have just smoked the Baptists out of one of their strongholds in the Blue Hills. If the sect that rules Giliad--never specified--is at war with the Baptists, with whom indeed could it be allied? Of whom indeed could it be composed? Not only are the Baptists the largest Protestant denomination in America, but they are surely the most theologically fundamentalist and politically reactionary of any of the mainline Christian sects. One can hardly imagine a faction of the Religious Right far enough to the right of the Baptists to be at war with them, and yet large and powerful enough to organize a coup to bring down the U.S. government. When, in addition, we discover that in the ongoing "sect wars" Catholicism has been declared illegal in the Republic of Giliad and its priests, when caught, are hanged, the implausibility of Atwood's theocratic future becomes even more obvious. Were the Religious Right to pose any real political threat, it would arise from a convergence of all the fundamentalist elements, not from internecine "sect wars" among them. One has to imagine Jerry Falwell in bed with Cardinal O'Connor--metaphorically speaking, of course--scratching each other's backs, not stabbing them. But since Falwell's Southern Baptists and O'Connor's Irish Catholics are criminalized in Giliad, its theocracy is composed of some nameless, nebulous sect sprung up from no known historical roots in the real-world body politic. Truth is, I suspect, that Atwood knew little about the specific varieties and vagaries of American fundamentalism and maybe cared less; she projects instead a suprahistorical entity whose origins exist more in demonology than in sociology. The Republic of Giliad, for instance, consists of Northeastern States, probably the most liberal in the nation, rather than being located in the South or the Sun Belt, where the Religious Right is the strongest. Depicting Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the thumb of theocratic thugs has a certain delicious perversity to it--rather like Huxley's converting the Atheneum into the Aphroditeum in Brave New World --but no demographic plausibility. Chattanooga or Searcy, Arkansas, much more likely theocropolises, lack the cachet of Cambridge (where Atwood once lived) and the shock value of having Harvard's Kennedy School of Government serve as the site of the inquisitional executions known as Salvagings.
Furthermore, the practice that provides the central metaphor of the novel--the handmaid's indentured service as surrogate womb has, of course, no sanction in Christian theology, fundamentalist or otherwise. The exigencies of Atwood's future, however, brought about by extreme environmental pollution and a consequent drastic decrease in fertility, necessitate and justify a practice like handmaidenry, condemnable as it might be by today's fundamentalist canons. Her argument, not wholly implausible, runs like this: the general patriarchal attitudes of fundamentalism, with its stress on the subservience and subordination of women, would, under dire circumstances, develop sufficient "scriptural" justification for such breeding tactics. (The Catholic Church at one time called clown the wrath of God on users of the effete Byzantine implement, the fork; Boston's Puritans opposed the installation of street lights as an incentive to wickedness: eternal verities can mutate, or as Groucho Marx once said: "I have my principles, but if you don't like these I have others.") The mutation from the real-world fundamentalism that we know to the fictive fundamentalism of Giliad posits a process in which certain already evident traits are exaggerated into new yet familiar configurations.
However, the Old Testament episode which, apparently, suggested handmaid surrogacy to Atwood (and from which she draws one of the novel's epigraphs) is not at all an instance of patriarchal dominance or exploitation. For feminist critics, the patriarchy--a vaguely conceived and indiscriminately adduced concept--serves the same purpose that Original Sin serves for Christians or that Capitalism served for Marxists, when there were still Marxists: as the source of and explanation for all evil. Atwood preaches to the feminist choir, then, when she makes patriarchy responsible for handmaidenry. In Genesis, however, the practice is a female ploy, the strategy of a barren wife to keep her husband away from the other woman who also happens to be his wife, and fertile. This bizarre menage a cinq --there are two handmaids involved--generates the Twelve Tribes of Israel and fully justified J. R. Ackerley's observation to a friend: "I am half way through Genesis and quite appalled by the disgraceful behavior of all the characters involved, including God." But in this instance, the particularly disgraceful behavior of coupling through a third party is Rachel's, not Jacob's--nor, presumably, God's. Atwood fails here to give discredit where discredit is due.
The final weakness that I see in The Handmaid's Tale concerns not so much its take on fundamentalism, but its failure to engage the dynamics of ideological revolution of any stripe. Put baldly, with the exception of the Aunts, who rank low in the revolutionary hierarchy, no one in Giliad seems to be a true believer in its revolution: it is a fanatical regime without the fanatics. True, the Aunts are the sort of gimlet-eyed, hard-hearted martinets familiar in and necessary to radical movements everywhere; but they are mere functionaries, and besides we never see what lies behind their public selves, what lurks beneath the wimple. But if the upper echelons are indicative, private selves in Giliad are quite different from the public ones. Consider Serena Joy, the wife of Offred's Commander, a wickedly sly cross between Phyllis Schlafly and Tammy Faye Bakker: she barely and ill conceals her disdain for the theocratic regulations of Giliad, violating them in ways small--like smoking black market cigarettes--and great--like scheming to get Offred impregnated by a chauffeur. The Commander, too, violates all manner of Giliadean proscriptions in conducting his forbidden liaison with his handmaid, obviously relishing all his "'sins." Although central characters in the tale, these two might be consider atypical exceptions, anomalies, but Offred learns from the doctor that handmaids are frequently impregnated illicitly--he offers Offred his services to that end--and from her trip to Jezebels with her Commander, she discovers that most of Giliad's big brass frequent these clandestine brothels. "Everyone's human, after all," the Commander explains. "You can't cheat Nature." A wonderfully tolerant point of view, probably even true, but hardly the credo that would make or sustain a revolution of the saints.
Atwood wants, apparently, to expose the hypocrisy behind the neo-puritianism of Cilia& to expose the fraudulent pretensions of a regime of Jimmy Swagger-like phonies. But do phonies--time servers, hypocrites, humbugs--make revolutions, radical ideological revolutions? For this one needs the flashing eye, the floating hair--Savanarola, not Machiavelli, Robespierrre, not Tartuffe, Ayatolla Khomeni, not Elmer Gantry, Orwell's O'Brien, not Atwood's Commander Fred. True, every violent revolution moves from a charismatic to a bureaucratic stage, where rule-following functionaries take over from fire-eating fanatics; but it seems too soon for Giliad to have ossified in this manner. Perhaps even more important, Atwood's narrative never conveys the sense of Giliad's ever having had a charismatic stage. Only the Aunts seem fanatic enough to make a revolution--and they are only girls. The rest lack all conviction.
A usual and significant feature of the dystopia is its agon , in which the rebellious protagonist confronts the apologist for the evil regime: D-503 and the Benefactor in We , John Savage and Mustapha Mond in Brave New World , Winston Smith and O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four , Montag and Capt. Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 , and so on. From their confrontations emerge not only the critical ideological issues at stake in each novel but the nature of the utopian-totalitarian personality itself, ruthless in its righteousness, power-mad in its piety (I have dealt extensively with this character type in a recent essay in Humanitas , "The Utopian as Sadist.") But no such agon occurs in The Handmaid's Tale and, given Atwood's cast of characters, perhaps none could. The Republic of Giliad is fanatically, even ascetically cruel in its ideology, but its rulers are flabby, passionless, without conviction. Elmer Gantry is no substitute for the Grand Inquisitor.
A primary difficulty--perhaps the primary difficulty--for anyone writing a cautionary tale about the destruction of American democracy by a radical coup, right or left, is, as I previously suggested, its implausibility. Not merely that, like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America where Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election, it didn't happen that way, but the utter improbability of its ever happening that way. When Sinclair Lewis set out in 1935 to show in It Can't Happen Here that it can happen here, that, as he claimed, when fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, the result was a clunky ideological potboiler that superimposes the German experience on America, complete with domestic versions of the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, concentration camps, etc., with sizeable doses of Huey Longish demagoguery substituted for Der Fuhrer's. If Lewis's (admirable) purpose was to warn against the then-rising tide of fascism, this book, its manifold artistic failings aside, must have ill-served that purpose, for its scenario is patently, even laughably improbable, so much so that at times one comes to doubt his seriousness. By contrast, those scenes near the end of Babbitt , where Vergil Gunch and The Good Citizens' League coerce Babbitt back into the booboisie from which he has strayed, have the sinister feel of an authentic American fascism in the making, a Big Brother is Watching You aura avant -Orwell. But It Can't Happen Here owes more to hysteria than to history, entirely untrue to the American experience, as it has been or is ever likely to be.
My claim, here, is that The Handmaid's Tale --if read as something more than "a jolly good yarn'--shares the same fate: absolute historical improbability. "How long have we got?" Nonsense. In some eyes--I can see them now: flinty, lizard-like, unforgiving: I have known them, known them all--this judgment will seem like an exercise in American exceptionalism, the belief that we are different and better than other nations; and to some degree it is. But now, to make my point, I must wax explicitly--and partisanly--political. I think we are living in one of the darkest periods in our nation's history, with serious threats posed to our rights and liberties. George Bush was arguably the worst U.S. President ever (I vote affirmative), a grotesque mockery of what a democratic leader ought to be. Never have so many fasciod personality types, led by Dick Cheney, occupied such high positions in government as in this administration. Corporate corrosion of the political process grows apace, and Congress seems enfeebled, the limp branch. Some of the more extreme bloggers even argue that the question is not when fascist regime change will occur, but just when after 9/11 it did.
But....
As I write news comes of U. S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruling that sections of the Bush-beloved Patriot Act "offends fundamental Constitutional principles," that the government's ability to demand records and use administrative subpoenas without warrants and judicial review is a violation of free speech and individual rights. Earlier the Supreme Court held that the military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lack "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions" signed in 1949. Even Congress shows signs of stirring from its somnambulance. Numerous books expressing more or less the same opinion of Bush and company that I just expressed abound: the presses that publish them have not been smashed, the stores that sell them have not been trashed. Even some members of his administration, disillusioned, have resigned and written highly critical accounts of what goes on there, but none has yet had an ice pick driven through his skull. None of the multiplying number of retired generals who question the conduct of the insane venture in Iraq has been sent to reeducation camps in darkest Arkansas, nor even, so far as I know, forfeited his pension. No secret army--Blackwater, say--has, in the name of national security, disbanded Congress, "preventively detained" its leaders, and "disappeared" the more recalcitrant ones, as happens in both It Can't Happen Here and The Handmaid's Tale : the putsch is not native to America. The judiciary still make independent judgments, wise or foolish as the case may be, but not obedient to obiter dicta from the oval office. Elections will be held come November when the electorate, if it chooses, can end the long national nightmare that the Bush Administration has been. And if not ... well, democracies, including ours, make a lot of mistakes. But true democracies retain the structure and mechanics for self-correction: the errors we make in one decade--like incarcerating Japanese-Americans in World War II--can be admitted and rectified in another. In short--to belabor the obvious no longer--American democracy is sound and stable, often disappointing in its collective decisions and clumsy in effecting its best intentions, but utterly, unequivocally unlikely--barring some unprecedented cataclysm--to transform into a fascist dictatorship along the lines of those in It Can't Happen Here or The Handmaid's Tale or, perhaps the most lurid of all, Jack London's prototypical The Iron Heel . (And if someday I'm being waterboarded by Blackwater functionaries in the basement of a federal building somewhere, I'm sure to be acutely embarrassed by these words.)
Jonathan Swift was much amused by the report of an Irish Bishop who, upon finishing Gulliver's Travels , declared that he believed hardly a word of it. In taking the approach to The Handmaid's Tale that I have, I fear running the risk of sounding like the Irish bishop, mistaking fantasy for reality. If one reads the book only as "a jolly good yarn," then my strictures are, of course, irrelevant. But if one reads it seriously, as a dystopia warning against a theocratic fascism as the shape of things to come, then the miscalculations that I have adduced call its effectiveness into question. To those who want to be afraid, to be very afraid, my apologies for offering words of reassurance: some books do give me nightmares, but The Handmaid's Tale is not one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atwood. Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale (1986). New York: Anchor Books, 1998.
Beauchamp, Gorman. "'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor': The Utopian as Sadist." Humanitas , 20:1-2 (2007), 125-51.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451 . New York: Random House, 1953.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932) and Brave New World Revisited (1958). New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (1935). New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
London, Jack. The Iron Heel . New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
--. "Notes on the Way." The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters . Vol. 2. Eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America . New York: Random House, 2004.
Zamyatin, Evgeny. We (1924). Trans. Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Named Works: The Handmaid's Tale (Novel) Criticism and interpretation; The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale (Essay)
Source Citation
Beauchamp, Gorman. "The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale." The Midwest Quarterly 51.1 (2009): 11+. General OneFile. Web. 5 Mar. 2011.
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In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?'" Such were the reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times , to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale . The British response is the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings . Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, the source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale.
Read "seriously" (in contrast to pure fantasy), the book belongs to the genre called the dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Science fiction works like Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up , while offering decidedly negative images of the future, are not truly dystopian because they lack an anti-utopian animus; Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World , by contrast, serve as paradigms of the genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from the implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to the political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, the dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather the bearing of those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of. Another tradition of utopias, however, depends on revelation rather than on reason, on some divine injunction or leading from above, in which case they are usually theocracies, regimes ruled by a priestly class whose authority rests in the will and word of God. Giliad--the futuristic society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale --is Atwood's dystopic projection of such a theocracy, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian theocracy.
Aldous Huxley has argued that "whatever its artistic or philosophic qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true." That is to say, the conviction or force that such projections convey depends on real-world conditions or, at least, on the perception of these conditions; consequently, as these conditions or perceptions change, so will the vatic force of the fictive projections. Powerful as Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in many ways, its potency as a possible and fearful future significantly declined with the decline of the old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. With the collapse of the Evil Empires of Orwell's day, the specter of Ingsoc no longer haunts Europe or the world. As long ago as 1958, in Brave New World Revisited , Huxley noted that "recent developments in Russia . . . have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude" and argued, correctly, that "the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than something like 1984 " looming in our future. We have, in other words, little cause to fear a future that does not seem a plausible extrapolation of current conditions. An America, for example, whose super rich convert to Christianity, sell all they have to give to the poor, and thus create a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a scenario that arouses much anxiety.
The question, then, that I want to consider is the plausibility, in light of current conditions, of the future depicted in The Handmaid's Tale . We ought, however, first recall that the purpose of a dystopia is not accurate prediction, but effective prophylaxis: the dystopist, that is, wants to offer a self-defeating prophecy. The media frenzy in and around 1984 over Nineteen Eighty-Four as prediction almost invariably missed the point that Orwell did not want to describe accurately a totalitarian future, but to forestall one. The less "right" he was, the better job he had done. Similarly, we may safely conclude that Atwood has no desire to prove an oracle; assuming, however, that her purpose is more than merely to entertain ("jolly good yarn"), the minatory force of her tale will depend on the effectiveness of her extrapolation from real and present dangers in today's society. Trueness to the future is thus not the crucial criterion of a dystopian vision, but trueness to the present, paradoxically, is.
Atwood's Giliad exists in the near future, not just within the lifetime of her protagonist Offred (or June) but within the span of her childbearing years. Less than a decade, seemingly, separates the Giliadian future from the (more or less) present, the world we know. Is so cataclysmic a social revolution occurring so abruptly plausible? Atwood has adduced the example of Iran under the ayatollahs as an instance of a society's performing such an abrupt volte-face ; and, indeed, the speed with which Iran retook the veil lends credence to her fictive scenario. Twentieth-century history offers other apt analogues. Could the boyars of Russia, in the summer of 1914, have imagined the epic transformation that the guns of August would inaugurate? Could a normal citizen of Weimar Germany in, say, 1929 have even begun to conceive what his nation would be like a decade later? "It is," Orwell wrote in 1940, "as though in the space of ten years we had slid back into the Stone Age. Human types supposedly extinct for centuries . . . have suddenly reappeared, not as inmates of lunatic asylums, but as masters of the world." Indeed, could any of us, only a few years ago, have predicted the collapse of the Soviet empire--so swiftly, so totally, so bloodlessly--and the momentous social transformations that followed in its wake? A sort of historical Doppler Effect seems to have developed where rapid and radical change appears to be the most dependable constant of our time. The once seemingly irreversible trend toward ever greater internationalism has foundered on the rocks of renewed nationalism, and even nationalism itself confronts the disintegrating forces of ethnic and religious tribalism. Not only are the Balkans being rebalkanized, so is much of the rest of the world. What Atwood projects, then, is the sort of cataclysmic upheaval that the rest of the world has experienced happening here and happening as the result of the same sort of disintegrating religious tribalism. The former United States is, in this scenario, a patchwork of warring satrapies, of which Giliad is but one, the area once known as New England.
Given, then, that historical analogues render Atwood's scenario not altogether implausible, the more crucial question (echoing the title of Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel on a similar theme) becomes: Can it happen here ? Atwood stated that she did not include anything in The Handmaid's Tale "that had not already happened or was not underway somewhere": perhaps so--somewhere--in Iran or Romania or East Timor, but in the United States? Even in this, one of the darkest and most retrograde periods of our nation's history? Is there, that is, any legitimate plausibility to her future and, therefore, any real force in her warning? When Atwood wrote the tale in 1985, the religious right was riding high, the result largely of tent revivalism's having discovered cable television. Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority--both now defunct--were receiving a lot of media attention; Jimmy and Tammy Faye Bakker had blubbered their way to a bizarre sort of celebrity; and the pre-masturbating-a-hooker-in-a-motel-room-revelation Jimmy Swaggert offered a nightly spectacle of evangelical rapture equaled in authenticity only by his peers in the World Wrestling Federation. All their grotesquerie appeared to many observers as the goofy-face of a serious sociological phenomenon, the coalescence of evangelical Christians--the lumpen-born-again--into a sizable and significant voting bloc. On this premise, Pat Robertson in 1988 mounted a campaign for President--that went nowhere. Nevertheless, the Religious Right seems to have established a permanent caucus in the Republican Party, where it pretty much writes party platform every four years and enjoys a veto over presidential candidates. It claims--and is claimed to have defeated the Equal Rights Amendment, has spearheaded jihads against legalized abortion, gay rights, and the mainstream media and, in general, served as God's PAC on earth. The fervor and tenor of the Religious Right can well be gauged by Pat Robertson's characterization of feminism as "a socialistic, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
The phenomenon, then, that Atwood extrapolates into Giliad--an intolerant, totalitarianoid fundamentalism, intent on culture war--obviously exists here and now; but is it really a serious enough phenomenon to send the sort of frisson down the spine that a dystopia should? I think not. Nineteen Eighty-Four frightened because there was a Stalin in the Kremlin and a Beria at Lubianka: consequently, as real-world totalitarianism receded, so did the dread produced by the fictive intensification of it in Oceania. Because technology more than polities informs Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World and Vonnegut's Player Piano --or, more precisely, a polities generated by advanced technology--and because the potential for a techno-tyranny remains quite plausible, these dystopias retain much of their minatory power. Compared to the cataclysmic totalitarian threats of yore (Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao) or the continuing techno-totalitarian threat, a neo-theocracy on the banks of the Charles inspires little fear as a plausible future. While admiring the imagination and artistry of The Handmaid's Tale , I find it wants to frighten us too much about too little.
When I suggested something along these lines to a class studying the book, I was surprised by the intensity of some students' objections to what I had said. With abortion clinics being bombed and gays being bashed, with Roe v. Wade hanging by a thread and Clarence Thomas recently ensconced on the Supreme Court--my example is of that vintage--with the forces of reaction infiltrating school boards and Intelligent Design being taught as science, my reservations were taken by the politically correctest among them to be ostrich-like at best and, at worst, objectively fascist, as old-line Marxists used to say. It was helpfully suggested that blindness like mine was exactly what had allowed Hitler to come to power. What, I protested, about all my Bush jokes? My small but very sincere contribution to People for the American Way? My support for the Dixie Chicks? Did these count for nothing in establishing my lefty-prof bona fides ? Nothing. If I was too obtuse to see that Giliad lurked just around the corner, then I probably also believed that Oswald shot Kennedy and "just say no" really worked. Clearly, I thought, my class was stoned--Oliver Stoned. But when later, untutored by this experience, I presented the same argument at an academic conference liberally sprinkled with feminists, the reaction was even more virulent--as I had no gradebook to brandish against the assault. Only an imperceptive and/or evil running dog of the status quo would have any but words of praise and thanks for Ms. Atwood's timely warning.
These experiences confirmed one of my suspicions: the dystopia serves for a certain kind of reader much the same function that the Gothic romance served for the eighteenth century or that slasher movies serve for the pubescenti today: to scare them silly. As one nineteenth-century poet sang in praise of Gothic terrors, "there is a joy in fear." The joy in fear that explains the appeal of horror stories probably also explains the appeal of the dystopia, an ideological horror story. My students, I realized, and my fellow conference goers of a certain persuasion wanted to be scared --scared by the specter of a shadowy cabal of rightwing zealots spreading its secret tentacles everywhere, just as earlier they had wanted to be scared by Freddie Kruger or Pinhead. The Nightmare on Elm Street and the nightmare in Room 101 have much the same psycho-aesthetic appeal: "there is a joy in fear." Thus, in minimizing the dangers that The Handmaid's Tale maximizes, I was literally acting as a killjoy, throwing warm water on them, so to speak. It was a critical approach not greatly welcome in class or at conference.
But I was not done. Atwood's tale, I went on to suggest, had other weaknesses in verisimilitude. One of these struck me when, early in the novel, in a casual bit of dialogue, there is mention that the armed forces of Giliad have just smoked the Baptists out of one of their strongholds in the Blue Hills. If the sect that rules Giliad--never specified--is at war with the Baptists, with whom indeed could it be allied? Of whom indeed could it be composed? Not only are the Baptists the largest Protestant denomination in America, but they are surely the most theologically fundamentalist and politically reactionary of any of the mainline Christian sects. One can hardly imagine a faction of the Religious Right far enough to the right of the Baptists to be at war with them, and yet large and powerful enough to organize a coup to bring down the U.S. government. When, in addition, we discover that in the ongoing "sect wars" Catholicism has been declared illegal in the Republic of Giliad and its priests, when caught, are hanged, the implausibility of Atwood's theocratic future becomes even more obvious. Were the Religious Right to pose any real political threat, it would arise from a convergence of all the fundamentalist elements, not from internecine "sect wars" among them. One has to imagine Jerry Falwell in bed with Cardinal O'Connor--metaphorically speaking, of course--scratching each other's backs, not stabbing them. But since Falwell's Southern Baptists and O'Connor's Irish Catholics are criminalized in Giliad, its theocracy is composed of some nameless, nebulous sect sprung up from no known historical roots in the real-world body politic. Truth is, I suspect, that Atwood knew little about the specific varieties and vagaries of American fundamentalism and maybe cared less; she projects instead a suprahistorical entity whose origins exist more in demonology than in sociology. The Republic of Giliad, for instance, consists of Northeastern States, probably the most liberal in the nation, rather than being located in the South or the Sun Belt, where the Religious Right is the strongest. Depicting Cambridge, Massachusetts, under the thumb of theocratic thugs has a certain delicious perversity to it--rather like Huxley's converting the Atheneum into the Aphroditeum in Brave New World --but no demographic plausibility. Chattanooga or Searcy, Arkansas, much more likely theocropolises, lack the cachet of Cambridge (where Atwood once lived) and the shock value of having Harvard's Kennedy School of Government serve as the site of the inquisitional executions known as Salvagings.
Furthermore, the practice that provides the central metaphor of the novel--the handmaid's indentured service as surrogate womb has, of course, no sanction in Christian theology, fundamentalist or otherwise. The exigencies of Atwood's future, however, brought about by extreme environmental pollution and a consequent drastic decrease in fertility, necessitate and justify a practice like handmaidenry, condemnable as it might be by today's fundamentalist canons. Her argument, not wholly implausible, runs like this: the general patriarchal attitudes of fundamentalism, with its stress on the subservience and subordination of women, would, under dire circumstances, develop sufficient "scriptural" justification for such breeding tactics. (The Catholic Church at one time called clown the wrath of God on users of the effete Byzantine implement, the fork; Boston's Puritans opposed the installation of street lights as an incentive to wickedness: eternal verities can mutate, or as Groucho Marx once said: "I have my principles, but if you don't like these I have others.") The mutation from the real-world fundamentalism that we know to the fictive fundamentalism of Giliad posits a process in which certain already evident traits are exaggerated into new yet familiar configurations.
However, the Old Testament episode which, apparently, suggested handmaid surrogacy to Atwood (and from which she draws one of the novel's epigraphs) is not at all an instance of patriarchal dominance or exploitation. For feminist critics, the patriarchy--a vaguely conceived and indiscriminately adduced concept--serves the same purpose that Original Sin serves for Christians or that Capitalism served for Marxists, when there were still Marxists: as the source of and explanation for all evil. Atwood preaches to the feminist choir, then, when she makes patriarchy responsible for handmaidenry. In Genesis, however, the practice is a female ploy, the strategy of a barren wife to keep her husband away from the other woman who also happens to be his wife, and fertile. This bizarre menage a cinq --there are two handmaids involved--generates the Twelve Tribes of Israel and fully justified J. R. Ackerley's observation to a friend: "I am half way through Genesis and quite appalled by the disgraceful behavior of all the characters involved, including God." But in this instance, the particularly disgraceful behavior of coupling through a third party is Rachel's, not Jacob's--nor, presumably, God's. Atwood fails here to give discredit where discredit is due.
The final weakness that I see in The Handmaid's Tale concerns not so much its take on fundamentalism, but its failure to engage the dynamics of ideological revolution of any stripe. Put baldly, with the exception of the Aunts, who rank low in the revolutionary hierarchy, no one in Giliad seems to be a true believer in its revolution: it is a fanatical regime without the fanatics. True, the Aunts are the sort of gimlet-eyed, hard-hearted martinets familiar in and necessary to radical movements everywhere; but they are mere functionaries, and besides we never see what lies behind their public selves, what lurks beneath the wimple. But if the upper echelons are indicative, private selves in Giliad are quite different from the public ones. Consider Serena Joy, the wife of Offred's Commander, a wickedly sly cross between Phyllis Schlafly and Tammy Faye Bakker: she barely and ill conceals her disdain for the theocratic regulations of Giliad, violating them in ways small--like smoking black market cigarettes--and great--like scheming to get Offred impregnated by a chauffeur. The Commander, too, violates all manner of Giliadean proscriptions in conducting his forbidden liaison with his handmaid, obviously relishing all his "'sins." Although central characters in the tale, these two might be consider atypical exceptions, anomalies, but Offred learns from the doctor that handmaids are frequently impregnated illicitly--he offers Offred his services to that end--and from her trip to Jezebels with her Commander, she discovers that most of Giliad's big brass frequent these clandestine brothels. "Everyone's human, after all," the Commander explains. "You can't cheat Nature." A wonderfully tolerant point of view, probably even true, but hardly the credo that would make or sustain a revolution of the saints.
Atwood wants, apparently, to expose the hypocrisy behind the neo-puritianism of Cilia& to expose the fraudulent pretensions of a regime of Jimmy Swagger-like phonies. But do phonies--time servers, hypocrites, humbugs--make revolutions, radical ideological revolutions? For this one needs the flashing eye, the floating hair--Savanarola, not Machiavelli, Robespierrre, not Tartuffe, Ayatolla Khomeni, not Elmer Gantry, Orwell's O'Brien, not Atwood's Commander Fred. True, every violent revolution moves from a charismatic to a bureaucratic stage, where rule-following functionaries take over from fire-eating fanatics; but it seems too soon for Giliad to have ossified in this manner. Perhaps even more important, Atwood's narrative never conveys the sense of Giliad's ever having had a charismatic stage. Only the Aunts seem fanatic enough to make a revolution--and they are only girls. The rest lack all conviction.
A usual and significant feature of the dystopia is its agon , in which the rebellious protagonist confronts the apologist for the evil regime: D-503 and the Benefactor in We , John Savage and Mustapha Mond in Brave New World , Winston Smith and O'Brien in Nineteen Eighty-Four , Montag and Capt. Beatty in Fahrenheit 451 , and so on. From their confrontations emerge not only the critical ideological issues at stake in each novel but the nature of the utopian-totalitarian personality itself, ruthless in its righteousness, power-mad in its piety (I have dealt extensively with this character type in a recent essay in Humanitas , "The Utopian as Sadist.") But no such agon occurs in The Handmaid's Tale and, given Atwood's cast of characters, perhaps none could. The Republic of Giliad is fanatically, even ascetically cruel in its ideology, but its rulers are flabby, passionless, without conviction. Elmer Gantry is no substitute for the Grand Inquisitor.
A primary difficulty--perhaps the primary difficulty--for anyone writing a cautionary tale about the destruction of American democracy by a radical coup, right or left, is, as I previously suggested, its implausibility. Not merely that, like Philip Roth's The Plot Against America where Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1940 election, it didn't happen that way, but the utter improbability of its ever happening that way. When Sinclair Lewis set out in 1935 to show in It Can't Happen Here that it can happen here, that, as he claimed, when fascism comes to America it will come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross, the result was a clunky ideological potboiler that superimposes the German experience on America, complete with domestic versions of the Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht, concentration camps, etc., with sizeable doses of Huey Longish demagoguery substituted for Der Fuhrer's. If Lewis's (admirable) purpose was to warn against the then-rising tide of fascism, this book, its manifold artistic failings aside, must have ill-served that purpose, for its scenario is patently, even laughably improbable, so much so that at times one comes to doubt his seriousness. By contrast, those scenes near the end of Babbitt , where Vergil Gunch and The Good Citizens' League coerce Babbitt back into the booboisie from which he has strayed, have the sinister feel of an authentic American fascism in the making, a Big Brother is Watching You aura avant -Orwell. But It Can't Happen Here owes more to hysteria than to history, entirely untrue to the American experience, as it has been or is ever likely to be.
My claim, here, is that The Handmaid's Tale --if read as something more than "a jolly good yarn'--shares the same fate: absolute historical improbability. "How long have we got?" Nonsense. In some eyes--I can see them now: flinty, lizard-like, unforgiving: I have known them, known them all--this judgment will seem like an exercise in American exceptionalism, the belief that we are different and better than other nations; and to some degree it is. But now, to make my point, I must wax explicitly--and partisanly--political. I think we are living in one of the darkest periods in our nation's history, with serious threats posed to our rights and liberties. George Bush was arguably the worst U.S. President ever (I vote affirmative), a grotesque mockery of what a democratic leader ought to be. Never have so many fasciod personality types, led by Dick Cheney, occupied such high positions in government as in this administration. Corporate corrosion of the political process grows apace, and Congress seems enfeebled, the limp branch. Some of the more extreme bloggers even argue that the question is not when fascist regime change will occur, but just when after 9/11 it did.
But....
As I write news comes of U. S. District Judge Victor Marrero ruling that sections of the Bush-beloved Patriot Act "offends fundamental Constitutional principles," that the government's ability to demand records and use administrative subpoenas without warrants and judicial review is a violation of free speech and individual rights. Earlier the Supreme Court held that the military commissions set up by the Bush administration to try detainees at Guantanamo Bay lack "the power to proceed because its structures and procedures violate both the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the four Geneva Conventions" signed in 1949. Even Congress shows signs of stirring from its somnambulance. Numerous books expressing more or less the same opinion of Bush and company that I just expressed abound: the presses that publish them have not been smashed, the stores that sell them have not been trashed. Even some members of his administration, disillusioned, have resigned and written highly critical accounts of what goes on there, but none has yet had an ice pick driven through his skull. None of the multiplying number of retired generals who question the conduct of the insane venture in Iraq has been sent to reeducation camps in darkest Arkansas, nor even, so far as I know, forfeited his pension. No secret army--Blackwater, say--has, in the name of national security, disbanded Congress, "preventively detained" its leaders, and "disappeared" the more recalcitrant ones, as happens in both It Can't Happen Here and The Handmaid's Tale : the putsch is not native to America. The judiciary still make independent judgments, wise or foolish as the case may be, but not obedient to obiter dicta from the oval office. Elections will be held come November when the electorate, if it chooses, can end the long national nightmare that the Bush Administration has been. And if not ... well, democracies, including ours, make a lot of mistakes. But true democracies retain the structure and mechanics for self-correction: the errors we make in one decade--like incarcerating Japanese-Americans in World War II--can be admitted and rectified in another. In short--to belabor the obvious no longer--American democracy is sound and stable, often disappointing in its collective decisions and clumsy in effecting its best intentions, but utterly, unequivocally unlikely--barring some unprecedented cataclysm--to transform into a fascist dictatorship along the lines of those in It Can't Happen Here or The Handmaid's Tale or, perhaps the most lurid of all, Jack London's prototypical The Iron Heel . (And if someday I'm being waterboarded by Blackwater functionaries in the basement of a federal building somewhere, I'm sure to be acutely embarrassed by these words.)
Jonathan Swift was much amused by the report of an Irish Bishop who, upon finishing Gulliver's Travels , declared that he believed hardly a word of it. In taking the approach to The Handmaid's Tale that I have, I fear running the risk of sounding like the Irish bishop, mistaking fantasy for reality. If one reads the book only as "a jolly good yarn," then my strictures are, of course, irrelevant. But if one reads it seriously, as a dystopia warning against a theocratic fascism as the shape of things to come, then the miscalculations that I have adduced call its effectiveness into question. To those who want to be afraid, to be very afraid, my apologies for offering words of reassurance: some books do give me nightmares, but The Handmaid's Tale is not one.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atwood. Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale (1986). New York: Anchor Books, 1998.
Beauchamp, Gorman. "'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor': The Utopian as Sadist." Humanitas , 20:1-2 (2007), 125-51.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451 . New York: Random House, 1953.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World (1932) and Brave New World Revisited (1958). New York: Harper Torchbook, 1965.
Lewis, Sinclair. It Can't Happen Here (1935). New York: Penguin Books, 2005.
London, Jack. The Iron Heel . New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1907.
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
--. "Notes on the Way." The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters . Vol. 2. Eds. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Roth, Philip. The Plot Against America . New York: Random House, 2004.
Zamyatin, Evgeny. We (1924). Trans. Clarence Brown. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.
Named Works: The Handmaid's Tale (Novel) Criticism and interpretation; The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale (Essay)
Source Citation
Beauchamp, Gorman. "The Politics of The Handmaid's Tale." The Midwest Quarterly 51.1 (2009): 11+. General OneFile. Web. 5 Mar. 2011.
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White -washing oppression in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale Précis
According to critic Ben Merriman, Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale, is a misdemeanor of oppression and the subjects in the novel are mere outlines of age old slavery. In everyday life, to be white is the norm and in particular this norm functions automatically, unless this median is subjected or undermined, racial misrepresentations may take place, even against the conscious intent of the author. These misrepresentations emerge throughout Atwood’s novel; she attempts to provide a conventional presentation of female utilization but in its place stands Offred, a white, college-educated American. Instead of using the usual racial exploitation, Atwood has replaced it with utilization of sexism; Atwood does not acknowledge the “parallels between her own story and the experience of black slavery.” Removing the historically-specific oppressions from their boarder perspective, takes this tale from speculative fiction, which is secured in reality, to a theoretically suspect and politically perilous fantasy.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are restricted from reading and writing and may not meet without supervision; this places meticulous importance on the female victimization presented in the novel. This theme of female victimization is vastly compatible in the enslavement of African Americans. This discrimination does not seem to play out in a historical or causal matter in The Handmaid’s Tale; Blacks are erased entirely in this novel and it’s covered in the Old Testament euphemism, The Republic of Gilead is an all-White closed society. Atwood took a vastly inventive leap in her novel, she wrote a White professional into the position of a Black slave. Back in the Antebellum South, the restrictions on literacy were based on race not gender and here it is acknowledged that Atwood has once again drawn from the pattern of Black slavery. The Handmaid’s Tale is implicated to be a record of a recitation given by Offred on the night of her escape into Canada; this resembles the stories of African Americans escaping to freedom in Canada. Concealed in clear sight, by the implausible but exceptionally compassionate Offred, is the crossroad among race and sex.
In The Handmaid’s Tale, women are restricted from reading and writing and may not meet without supervision; this places meticulous importance on the female victimization presented in the novel. This theme of female victimization is vastly compatible in the enslavement of African Americans. This discrimination does not seem to play out in a historical or causal matter in The Handmaid’s Tale; Blacks are erased entirely in this novel and it’s covered in the Old Testament euphemism, The Republic of Gilead is an all-White closed society. Atwood took a vastly inventive leap in her novel, she wrote a White professional into the position of a Black slave. Back in the Antebellum South, the restrictions on literacy were based on race not gender and here it is acknowledged that Atwood has once again drawn from the pattern of Black slavery. The Handmaid’s Tale is implicated to be a record of a recitation given by Offred on the night of her escape into Canada; this resembles the stories of African Americans escaping to freedom in Canada. Concealed in clear sight, by the implausible but exceptionally compassionate Offred, is the crossroad among race and sex.
White-washing oppression in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.
Notes on Contemporary Literature 39.1 (Jan 2009)(804 words)
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Author(s): Ben Merriman.
Document Type: Magazine/Journal
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COPYRIGHT 2009 Notes on Contemporary Literature
White privilege is rarely manifested in intentional, positive acts. It is, in Peggy McIntosh's terms, "invisible," "unearned," and "cashed in each day" ("White Privilege and Male Privilege" in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror [Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997]: 291). To be White is to be the norm, universal. This norm functions automatically, and unless the universality of White experience is explicitly questioned or subverted, racial distortions may appear even against the conscious intent of an author.
Such distortions appear throughout Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1986). Atwood attempts to offer an archetypal account of female exploitation, but the stand-in for this universal experience is Offred, a White, college-educated American. Offred would seem an unlikely victim, but at no point in the text does Atwood acknowledge that sexism in America has, generally, been modulated by forms of race and class oppression, nor does she acknowledge the parallels between her own story and the experience of Black slavery. Because these historically-specific oppressions are removed from their broader context, the Tale drifts from speculative fiction, which is anchored in reality, into conceptually suspect and politically hazardous fantasy.
Atwood's dystopia is set in the late 20th Century, when a cadre of fundamentalist Christians have overthrown the U.S. government and created the theocratic Republic of Gilead. Due to an unexplained fertility crisis, the government has impressed unmarried women of proven fertility into a state of sexual servitude. Many others work as domestic slaves in an autarkic, inefficient command economy. Women are forbidden to read or to meet without supervision. The novel thus places particular emphasis on the most persistent forms of female victimization: the sexual exploitation, isolation, and compelled ignorance that accompany severe economic and political powerlessness.
These forms of victimization do not function in a vacuum, and in the United States they have been associated most strongly with the enslavement of African-Americans. Forced procreation arose from widespread slavery associated with plantation agriculture, particularly during in the 19th Century, when the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was on the wane and industrialization increased the demand for raw materials. This form of abuse followed a specific vector, from the White slaveholding man to the Black enslaved woman.
In The Handmaid's Tale, victimization does appear to function in a historical and causal vacuum. The Republic of Gilead is an all-White enclave, and Blacks are erased from the novel in a single line, cloaked in Old Testament euphemism:
"'Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule,' says the reassuring pink face, back on the screen. 'Three thousand have arrived this week in National Homeland One, with another two thousand in transit.'" (83)
While the demand for Black slaves had a well-established economic cause, Offred is forced to copulate because of the novel's two ill-supported pretenses: the coup, which is glossed over in less than a paragraph, and the nebulous, unexplained "fertility crisis." These are clearly fantastic rather than speculative devices, and it is only by this inventive leap that Atwood can write a White professional into the position of a Black slave.
The restrictions on reading and assembly in the Tale are similarly contrived. Tight controls on literacy have been the norm throughout Christian history, but these controls have not been exclusively gendered. The hegemony of Latin into the 16th Century functioned as a form of class oppression. In the Antebellum South, restrictions on literacy were based on race, not gender, and here Atwood again draws from the precedent of Black slavery without acknowledgement. The novel is understood to be a transcript of a recitation given by Offred on the night of her escape into Canada. In the slave narrative genre, the "orality" of the text owed to the illiteracy of the narrator, or to the fact that the narrative was recited for a gathered crowd. Offred, a former librarian, is highly literate, and she is speaking to a tape recorder. This orality has the putative function of letting Offred's fate remain unknown to the reader. However, its deeper function is precisely the opposite. Leaving Offred in suspension, without access to paper, allows Atwood to maintain the increasingly dubious parallels to the experience of slavery.
Atwood's intentions for writing The Handmaid's Tale are noble, and most readers find it smooth and convincing. It is thus an object lesson in the pernicious character of White Privilege--a well-written, imaginative, and humane novel can nonetheless hide the link between racism and sexism. In fact, Atwood's exercise of racial privilege is more problematic because of her talent. She deftly parodies the clumsy language of racial propaganda and offers a convincing portrait of the placid, banal evil of the religious extremist. The intersection between race and sex is itself hidden in plain sight, in the improbable but extremely sympathetic Offred, and only a cad would greet her with suspicion.
Ben Merriman, University of Chicago.
Named Works: The Handmaid's Tale (Novel) Criticism and interpretation
Source Citation
Merriman, Ben. "White-washing oppression in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." Notes on Contemporary Literature 39.1 (2009). Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Mar. 2011.
Document URL
http://find.galegroup.com/gps/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=IPS&docId=A206534450&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=ko_k12hs_d21&version=1.0
Show details
Author(s): Ben Merriman.
Document Type: Magazine/Journal
Bookmark: Bookmark this Document
________________________________________
COPYRIGHT 2009 Notes on Contemporary Literature
White privilege is rarely manifested in intentional, positive acts. It is, in Peggy McIntosh's terms, "invisible," "unearned," and "cashed in each day" ("White Privilege and Male Privilege" in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror [Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997]: 291). To be White is to be the norm, universal. This norm functions automatically, and unless the universality of White experience is explicitly questioned or subverted, racial distortions may appear even against the conscious intent of an author.
Such distortions appear throughout Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1986). Atwood attempts to offer an archetypal account of female exploitation, but the stand-in for this universal experience is Offred, a White, college-educated American. Offred would seem an unlikely victim, but at no point in the text does Atwood acknowledge that sexism in America has, generally, been modulated by forms of race and class oppression, nor does she acknowledge the parallels between her own story and the experience of Black slavery. Because these historically-specific oppressions are removed from their broader context, the Tale drifts from speculative fiction, which is anchored in reality, into conceptually suspect and politically hazardous fantasy.
Atwood's dystopia is set in the late 20th Century, when a cadre of fundamentalist Christians have overthrown the U.S. government and created the theocratic Republic of Gilead. Due to an unexplained fertility crisis, the government has impressed unmarried women of proven fertility into a state of sexual servitude. Many others work as domestic slaves in an autarkic, inefficient command economy. Women are forbidden to read or to meet without supervision. The novel thus places particular emphasis on the most persistent forms of female victimization: the sexual exploitation, isolation, and compelled ignorance that accompany severe economic and political powerlessness.
These forms of victimization do not function in a vacuum, and in the United States they have been associated most strongly with the enslavement of African-Americans. Forced procreation arose from widespread slavery associated with plantation agriculture, particularly during in the 19th Century, when the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was on the wane and industrialization increased the demand for raw materials. This form of abuse followed a specific vector, from the White slaveholding man to the Black enslaved woman.
In The Handmaid's Tale, victimization does appear to function in a historical and causal vacuum. The Republic of Gilead is an all-White enclave, and Blacks are erased from the novel in a single line, cloaked in Old Testament euphemism:
"'Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule,' says the reassuring pink face, back on the screen. 'Three thousand have arrived this week in National Homeland One, with another two thousand in transit.'" (83)
While the demand for Black slaves had a well-established economic cause, Offred is forced to copulate because of the novel's two ill-supported pretenses: the coup, which is glossed over in less than a paragraph, and the nebulous, unexplained "fertility crisis." These are clearly fantastic rather than speculative devices, and it is only by this inventive leap that Atwood can write a White professional into the position of a Black slave.
The restrictions on reading and assembly in the Tale are similarly contrived. Tight controls on literacy have been the norm throughout Christian history, but these controls have not been exclusively gendered. The hegemony of Latin into the 16th Century functioned as a form of class oppression. In the Antebellum South, restrictions on literacy were based on race, not gender, and here Atwood again draws from the precedent of Black slavery without acknowledgement. The novel is understood to be a transcript of a recitation given by Offred on the night of her escape into Canada. In the slave narrative genre, the "orality" of the text owed to the illiteracy of the narrator, or to the fact that the narrative was recited for a gathered crowd. Offred, a former librarian, is highly literate, and she is speaking to a tape recorder. This orality has the putative function of letting Offred's fate remain unknown to the reader. However, its deeper function is precisely the opposite. Leaving Offred in suspension, without access to paper, allows Atwood to maintain the increasingly dubious parallels to the experience of slavery.
Atwood's intentions for writing The Handmaid's Tale are noble, and most readers find it smooth and convincing. It is thus an object lesson in the pernicious character of White Privilege--a well-written, imaginative, and humane novel can nonetheless hide the link between racism and sexism. In fact, Atwood's exercise of racial privilege is more problematic because of her talent. She deftly parodies the clumsy language of racial propaganda and offers a convincing portrait of the placid, banal evil of the religious extremist. The intersection between race and sex is itself hidden in plain sight, in the improbable but extremely sympathetic Offred, and only a cad would greet her with suspicion.
Ben Merriman, University of Chicago.
Named Works: The Handmaid's Tale (Novel) Criticism and interpretation
Source Citation
Merriman, Ben. "White-washing oppression in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale." Notes on Contemporary Literature 39.1 (2009). Academic OneFile. Web. 5 Mar. 2011.
Document URL
http://find.galegroup.com/gps/infomark.do?&contentSet=IAC-Documents&type=retrieve&tabID=T002&prodId=IPS&docId=A206534450&source=gale&srcprod=AONE&userGroupName=ko_k12hs_d21&version=1.0
Saturday, March 5, 2011
“The Handmaid’s Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984” Précis
The literary criticism “The Handmaid’s Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984” by Jocelyn Harris, depicts how Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a modification to Orwell’s 1984. Many themes within the two novels are compatible. The idea of a totalitarian (A dictatorship; a political system based on absolute power of a single party or dictator) civilization alienated into hierarchy, is expresses constantly throughout both novels. In The Handmaid’s Tale, the Republic of Gilead was created after a fearfully intended terrorist attack was staged against the President of the U.S. Afterwards, a rebellion took place which overthrew the U.S government and eradicated the Constitution; a new government was fashioned under the rule of a military monocracy. The Republic of Gilead is governed according to strict Old Testament-based religious creed. Other religions are not tolerated, and those who do not accept are swiftly executed or shipped to "colonies" which have treacherously high levels of radiation. Both in Orwell’s and Atwood’s books, only the auspicious obtain genuine provisions and the different orders are labeled by particular clothing.
Another similarity is that both communities are scrutinized by “secret enforcements of law”, for Atwood, Eyes and Angels. The spying, subjective arrest and anguish are all the corresponding subjects. Jocelyn Harris stated that “Deliberate incitements to blood lust hold these societies together” In both novels, the authors have created things that the characters crave. Characters within the two novels seem to long for the wall hangings of the “enemies” of the state; it’s really to make a spectacle of them. In The Handmaid’s Tale for instance, Offred and Ofglen cannot help but to pass the wall on the way home from their walks; something inside them desires to see it. Discrimination is a recurring theme in both, Atwood with Quakers, Baptists, feminists, homosexuals, and abortionists; and in Orwell’s with Jews and other nation states. The sexual oppression aids social dominance; in 1984 children are taken from their parents at birth “as one takes eggs from a hen”. The same situation takes place in The Handmaid’s Tale when Offred’s daughter is torn away from her. Harris claims that the characters in the two novels share the irrepressible recollection of memory. Orwell’s character Winston recalls his mother, lost in the great purge and an affair in an unspoiled forest in a Golden Age. Atwood’s Offred remembers her mother as well, sent to a fatal Colony for being a feminist, and bears in mind the memory of happiness with her husband Luke and her daughter.
The protagonists of both the novels revolt, by means of sexuality, memory, reading/writing, trust, and desire to escape: Winston concocts various ways to break free; Offred envisions multiple opportunities for Luke, her mother, her daughter, and herself. In the criticism, Harris acknowledges that even the smallest of details are comparable between the two books. For example, “the yellow teeth of the rat which finally breaks Winston become Aunt Lydia’s, while the humiliations, punishments and petty rebellions of Orwell’s public-school life are renewed in Atwood’s re-education centers, which have been set up in girls’ schools.
It is mentioned that The Handmaid’s Tale embarks where 1984 leaves off; instead of outlining the demolition of a rebel, it depicts a victim learning to survive. Margaret Atwood wrote in her book Survival “if you are determined to be a victim, that’s exactly what you will be.” “The Handmaid’s Tale is indeed a Rapunzel in a tower, veiled, self-silenced, long-haired like Alice in a world of distorting fish-eye mirrors. But in this version of the tale Nick has no rose, no lute, and she herself will break out.” Identified in the criticism, this is stating how the protagonists of the novels do not have anyone to come save them, they must do it on their own.
Harris points out that Orwell’s 1984 were just simply providing Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with raw materials and it was once said by Northrop Frye that books are inevitably made out of other books. Joyce Harris refers to The Handmaid’s Tale as a metatext - a text that comments on another text, more so than a translation. Atwood’s analysis on Orwell was also discussed in the criticism, it’s stated that Atwood critiques Orwell for locating the origins of totalitarianism in class and among men only; she accuses him of underestimating the evil of misogyny. Atwood had said “we already live in a state of war ‘between those who would like the future to be, in the words of George Orwell, a boot grinding forever into a human face, and those who like it to be a state of something we still dream of as freedom.’ In such a world, in such a dystopia (state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror), all hands are needed on deck.”
Another similarity is that both communities are scrutinized by “secret enforcements of law”, for Atwood, Eyes and Angels. The spying, subjective arrest and anguish are all the corresponding subjects. Jocelyn Harris stated that “Deliberate incitements to blood lust hold these societies together” In both novels, the authors have created things that the characters crave. Characters within the two novels seem to long for the wall hangings of the “enemies” of the state; it’s really to make a spectacle of them. In The Handmaid’s Tale for instance, Offred and Ofglen cannot help but to pass the wall on the way home from their walks; something inside them desires to see it. Discrimination is a recurring theme in both, Atwood with Quakers, Baptists, feminists, homosexuals, and abortionists; and in Orwell’s with Jews and other nation states. The sexual oppression aids social dominance; in 1984 children are taken from their parents at birth “as one takes eggs from a hen”. The same situation takes place in The Handmaid’s Tale when Offred’s daughter is torn away from her. Harris claims that the characters in the two novels share the irrepressible recollection of memory. Orwell’s character Winston recalls his mother, lost in the great purge and an affair in an unspoiled forest in a Golden Age. Atwood’s Offred remembers her mother as well, sent to a fatal Colony for being a feminist, and bears in mind the memory of happiness with her husband Luke and her daughter.
The protagonists of both the novels revolt, by means of sexuality, memory, reading/writing, trust, and desire to escape: Winston concocts various ways to break free; Offred envisions multiple opportunities for Luke, her mother, her daughter, and herself. In the criticism, Harris acknowledges that even the smallest of details are comparable between the two books. For example, “the yellow teeth of the rat which finally breaks Winston become Aunt Lydia’s, while the humiliations, punishments and petty rebellions of Orwell’s public-school life are renewed in Atwood’s re-education centers, which have been set up in girls’ schools.
It is mentioned that The Handmaid’s Tale embarks where 1984 leaves off; instead of outlining the demolition of a rebel, it depicts a victim learning to survive. Margaret Atwood wrote in her book Survival “if you are determined to be a victim, that’s exactly what you will be.” “The Handmaid’s Tale is indeed a Rapunzel in a tower, veiled, self-silenced, long-haired like Alice in a world of distorting fish-eye mirrors. But in this version of the tale Nick has no rose, no lute, and she herself will break out.” Identified in the criticism, this is stating how the protagonists of the novels do not have anyone to come save them, they must do it on their own.
Harris points out that Orwell’s 1984 were just simply providing Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale with raw materials and it was once said by Northrop Frye that books are inevitably made out of other books. Joyce Harris refers to The Handmaid’s Tale as a metatext - a text that comments on another text, more so than a translation. Atwood’s analysis on Orwell was also discussed in the criticism, it’s stated that Atwood critiques Orwell for locating the origins of totalitarianism in class and among men only; she accuses him of underestimating the evil of misogyny. Atwood had said “we already live in a state of war ‘between those who would like the future to be, in the words of George Orwell, a boot grinding forever into a human face, and those who like it to be a state of something we still dream of as freedom.’ In such a world, in such a dystopia (state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror), all hands are needed on deck.”
"The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984"
Critic: Jocelyn Harris
Source: Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.
Criticism about: Dystopias in Contemporary Literature
"The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984",
[(essay date 1999) In the following essay, Harris examines parallels between Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, asserting that Atwood's novel is a critique of George Orwell's treatment of women in his works.]
By publishing The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Margaret Atwood openly invited comparison between her own dystopian novel and George Orwell's 1984. She herself draws the parallel when in an interview of 1986 she compares her epilogue to his:
In fact, Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for. He did the same thing. He has a text at the end of 1984. Most people think the book ends when Winston comes to love Big Brother. But it doesn't. It ends with a note on Newspeak, which is written in the past tense, in standard English--which means that, at the time of writing the note, Newspeak is a thing of the past.1
Indeed, if his Winston Smith had imagined "little knots of resistance ... leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off," the Handmaid's tapes similarly survive.2 As Atwood remarks in the same interview, "I'm an optimist. I like to show that the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever." By means of a recorded voice she creates the same miracle as in Shakespeare's sonnet 65, where black marks on white paper still express love: she allows the dead to speak. And although Atwood says that "writers frequently conceal things. They ... don't want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets they don't want to give away," I shall argue that she wants us to notice whenever she imitates and diverges from Orwell. Her invitation has vital theoretical implications for this author's use of allusion, and more generally for the way that books are made.
First, the similarities. Gilead, the world of The Handmaid's Tale, is recognizably Orwellian in both structure and minute detail. In both novels, a totalitarian society is divided by hierarchy; at a time of rations and austerity, only the privileged in Atwood receive real food, as in Orwell (278), and the separate orders are marked by distinctive clothing as they were in 1984, indeed as they are distinguished traditionally in utopian fiction as far back as More's use of the sumptuary laws in his Utopia. The Commander's shoes, shiny like black beetles, especially recall Orwell's definition of tyranny as the boot stepping on the human face, for ever.3
Both societies are controlled by secret police, Atwood's Eyes, and soldiers, Atwood's Angels. Spying, betrayal, arbitrary arrest and torture are all commonplace. Winston is betrayed by Charrington and O'Brien, whom he trusted; the Handmaid and her family are also betrayed, and the worst is knowing "that some other human being has wished you that much evil" (30). If Orwell's Julia is doubled over by a fist in the solar plexus and carried out like a sack (350), a man in The Handmaid's Tale is doubled over by something sharp and brutal done to him, and is carried away like a sack of mail (27). Winston and Julia are tortured; Atwood's Moira suffers the bastinado (15), and the younger nuns, who do not let go so easily, are more broken than the rest of the women (34). Deliberate incitements to blood lust hold these societies together: Orwell's Two Minutes Hate (165) and his Hate Week (157) serve the same purpose of arousal as Atwood's Wall hung with the corpses of enemies of the state. Her Prayvaganza and Salvagings, or public hangings, recall Orwell's hangings which children clamor to attend and Syme enjoys (176, 199). During the hangings the Handmaids must hold a rope coated with pitch so that their defilement is truly collective (42); Winston finds it impossible not to join in raging at Goldstein (168). Atwood's Particicution, in which helping to tear a man to death makes the Handmaid as hungry as a horse (44), arouses the participants to the same sort of bestiality as in Orwell (313). Imaginary enemies and reports of war reinforce this tribal blood lust--Jews and other nation states in Orwell, Quakers, Baptists, feminists, homosexuals, and abortionists in Atwood. The sadism that Orwell argues to be characteristic of totalitarianism hideously spreads, so that even Winston would throw acid in a child's face (305). In totalitarian Gilead, violence is always a threat or an open presence, and the thought of it arouses even the Handmaid, numbed as she is. She longs to stab the Commander, to "put my arms around him and slip the lever from the sleeve and drive the sharp end into him suddenly, between his ribs. I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands" (23).
Sexual repression assists social control. O'Brien boasts in 1984, "We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman." Children are taken away at birth "as one takes eggs from a hen," he says. So too the Handmaid's daughter is torn away from her. In a society where sex is "an annual formality" for procreation only (389), Winston and Julia's love affairs necessarily becomes "a political act" (265). The Handmaid's affair with Nick is equally subversive.
Orwell famously simplifies the language in 1984 to Newspeak and Doublethink, to words stripped of all politically undesirable associations. As he writes in the Appendix, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible." It was designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." Parts of speech are interchangeable, and negatives are formed simply by adding the prefix "un-." Thus rejects from society are "unpersons" in Orwell, and Atwood talks similarly of "Unwomen" and "Unbabies," the imperfect ones, the "shredders." Orwell's B vocabulary imposes desirable mental attitudes for political purposes, and obliterates value words such as free, honor, justice and morality. So does the official language of Gilead.
Atwood believes, as Frank Davey puts it, that all the troubles of the world are in a sense linguistic: the female Wordhoarder in her futuristic story, "The Festival of Missed Crass," speaks for her as a "custodian of language and culture, a protector and renewer of meanings."4 In her futuristic novel, Atwood demonstrates the disaster that results from the burning of books, the closing of libraries, the ban on reading and writing, and the reduction of conversation to brief, ritualized phrases of subservience. "Under his Eye," say the Handmaids, like Winston knowing that Big Brother is watching him. In this pre-literate world, shop signs replace words, often to comic effect. The "Loaves and Fishes" has nothing in it, let alone enough to feed a multitude (27), and the Handmaid asks whether it would count to read the cushion with "FAITH" stitched upon it (10). If Orwell had devised such euphemisms as "Ministry of Love" for a place of torture, "colonies" for places where homeless children are sent, and "Reclamation Centres" for labor camps (298), Atwood also uses "Colonies" for places of death rather than new life, and "Salvaging" for hanging. Of course, both authors remember Nazi Germany, while "Salvaging" is a piece of Doublespeak actually invented in the Philippines, as her epilogue makes clear. In Orwell, class threatens individual identity; in Atwood personal names are similarly replaced by those of function. Wives, Econowives and Handmaids are defined simply by their relationship to men. A woman who is simply Offred, of the Commander, is indeed the non-essential, sexual other described by Simone de Beauvoir, the object to his absolute subject.5
Along with language, both societies suppress memory, and in consequence history, truth, and choice. Winston knows that all history is a palimpsest, to be scraped clean and re-inscribed (190); O'Brien says, "You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you ... You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed" (378). Former leaders disappear along with their photograph in Orwell; a film of Offred's feminist mother is blacked out with crayon in Atwood (20). "Orthodoxy," says Syme, "means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" (202). Offred drifts as if anesthetized in an eternal present, fed and bathed like a child, like a doll, infantized. She even speaks in the present tense, and her sentences are often incomplete, or unfold in the linear, flat, affectless mode of the comma splice. But when she says of Luke, "he was, the loved. One. Is, I say Is, is, two letters, you stupid shit, can't you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?" (35), she fights to keep meaning alive, and hope.
Memory proves irrepressible in both books. Winston remembers his mother, lost in the great purge, and an affair in an unspoiled forest in a Golden Age (181-82); Offred also remembers her mother, sent to a deadly Colony for being a feminist, and looks back to a time of happiness with Luke and their daughter. Her way of recollection recalls Locke's phrase for associationism, "the hooks and eyes of memory." It hurts here to remember: as Atwood wrote in a poem elsewhere,
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.6
The Handmaid's associative, involuntary memory is triggered in a very Proustian way through the senses, "a reminder, like a kick," from such banal objects as a blue and white striped tea-towel (8), or the chocolate fragments on an ice cream (27). Then flood in choice, pun, variety--in short, the free play of the signifier--and with them comprehensive memory, history, truth, understanding, and at last, freedom.
"It's strange, now," [muses the Handmaid], "to think about having a job. Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie, they'd say to children, when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet. You were supposed to hit them with rolled-up newspapers, my mother said. I can remember when there were newspapers, though I never had a dog, only cats."
"The Book of Job" (28)
Thus she works her way like a lexicographer from meaning to meaning, from the financial dependence of women to memories of newspapers to the recognition that she is persecuted and afflicted by arbitrary powers, like Job. She has named the truth.
Thus, acts of reading, remembering, and writing defy a totalitarian regime. If Winston writes "voluptuously" on the thick creamy paper of his diary (171), the Handmaid uses the same lavish word to describe her feelings when she plays Scrabble:
We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious.
(23)
Words arouse her: she imagines "the Commander and me, covering each other with ink, licking it off, or making love on stacks of forbidden newsprint" (28). Holding a pen is an especially sensuous experience. It is "alive, almost, I can feel its power." When in a pleasant pun she says, "Pen Is Envy ... I envy the Commander his pen" (29), she takes issue with Freud, whose therapy worked also through association and word-play. What women want, she says, is not a penis but a pen, the power to write. Only thus can they speak to posterity, survive and tell their truths. "A word after a word / after a word is power," Atwood wrote in a poem.7
Words promise communication, and trust. If "faint scribbles on lavatory walls" (171) encourage Winston to hope for an underground resistance, "Aunt Lydia sucks" scratched on the cubicle is "like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion" (34). Offred is comforted too by the dog-Latin inscribed by one of her predecessors, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" (p. 156), don't let the bastards grind you down. Ofglen and Offred dare to let their eyes meet, to question the value of the Soul Scrolls, and in this breathtaking moment of "subversion, sedition, blasphemy, heresy, all rolled into one", they trust each other (27), and Offred learns that there is an underground. She will escape.
Winston and Offred rebel, then, by means of sexuality, memory, writing, trust, and dreams of escape: Winston devises numerous ways to break out (287); the Handmaid imagines multiple possibilities for Luke, her mother, her daughter, and herself. Even tiny details confirm the deliberate kinship between the two books, for instance the long yellow teeth of the rat which finally breaks Winston become Aunt Lydia's, while the humiliations, punishments, and petty rebellions of Orwell's public-school life are renewed in Atwood's re-education centers, which have been set up in girls' schools.
But the differences are vital too. Atwood sets her dystopia not in Orwell's socialist Britain but in the capitalist USA, at the very heart of scientific enquiry and liberal humanist education, Harvard University. Here the Puritans rebelled against British imperialism, but they also memorably oppressed. Puritan fundamentalism rules a state devastated by ecological disaster, the bitter fruit of scientific progress. The Harvard Wall, hung with corpses, reminds us of the Berlin Wall which Kennedy of Harvard visited so pointedly as a free man, for in Gilead no one is free.
Not the new invention of television, as in Orwell, but the even newer one of electronic money management has brought this dystopia about. Women have been rendered powerless simply by the withdrawal of their credit at banks. Virginia Woolf had argued in Three Guineas that the powerlessness of women derived from denial of access to education, writing, and therefore money, and she drew an explicit comparison between the exclusion of women and the exclusion of Jews, between nineteenth-century feminists fighting patriarchy and the twentieth-century need to fight Fascism. The fear that forbids freedom in a private house is connected with the public fear of the dictator, she wrote, for "the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."8 Nor was the idea new with her. In reply to Sir Robert Filmer's justification of the divine right of kings on the analogy of husband and wife, in his Patriarcha (1680), John Locke had argued in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1689-90) that men were entitled to rebel against unjust tyranny. And if the organization of state and family was the same, it was logical to conclude that a woman could resist her domestic king if he proved tyrannical. Locke in fact says that there were two curses laid upon women, pain in childbirth and obedience to their husbands. Having urged women to avoid pain in childbirth if they could, he stopped just short of recommending they disobey their husbands by recollecting the force of custom. But others saw where his train of thought was leading, and the idea of the family as a domestic monarchy was made much of by Restoration dramatists, women writers of the eighteenth century, and most powerfully Samuel Richardson, in Pamela and Clarissa.9
In his time Orwell also knew that private and public words were linked, that men could be "little Stalins, little Hitlers" to other men, as Crick puts it (122), but he did not extend this important insight to men's hierarchy over women. Atwood seems to agree with Woolf that gender, not class, is the source of tyranny, and thus casts her vote against Orwell in the debate identified by Adrienne Rich, as to "whether an oppressive economic class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in fact patriarchy--the domination of males--is the original model of oppression on which all are based."10
The source of women's oppression is misogyny, and Atwood criticizes Winston's hatred of women by her differences. He thinks his wife Katherine has "the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered," and complains that in the sexual act she "would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and after a while, horrible" (213-14). Atwood comments on this "frigid little ceremony" (270) when she elaborates it into her own grotesque, ritualized "Ceremony." As the Commander couples mechanically with the Handmaid, Atwood, unlike Orwell, makes us feel for the woman who passively lies there. And where Julia's instant responsiveness is a male fantasy come true (264-65)--Winston is excited by Julia's "improvement" by cosmetics, her womanly longing for a frock, for silk stockings and high heeled shoes (279)--the Handmaid's tawdry dress, "absurdly high heels" and smeared makeup serve only to mark the pathetic dreams of the Commander (300). Winston may think himself intellectually superior to Julia, but from Orwell's hints that she swears, and laughs during the Two Minutes Hate (289), Atwood would develop Moira, the bravest, the most boisterous of all the Handmaids.
Winston dreams avidly of rape and murder (169);11 the Handmaid is haunted by her memories of snuff movies and pornography, because she knows how they threaten her. And if Winston thinks women are sexual objects, stupid, and only rebellious from the waist down (291), Offred's persistent imaging of the separation of the heads from bodies as hateful, for instance, when the hanging sheet at the doctor's "intersects" her (11), shows Atwood thinking perhaps of Descartes. Her female protagonist is not a sex object, but a thinking subject, whose head and body are one. But Atwood's most defiant answer to the misogyny of 1984 is to make a woman the center of narrative consciousness. Where Orwell spoke as an author, authoritatively, using the omniscient voice, this heroine speaks directly to us. Like Chaucer, whom Atwood's title deliberately invokes, she allows her character to speak for herself.
And where Winston was betrayed by the Brotherhood, Nick and Offred's "sisters" befriend her and help her along the Underground Female-road. Winston and Julia thought only of themselves, at the end: "the proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you" (244); but Offred's predecessor wrote a message of encouragement before she hanged herself, and Ofglen dies in order that Offred may live. "She saw the van coming for her. It was better," says the new, replacement Ofglen (44). Orwell believed that mutual trust was the sole foundation for democracy, but his hope was not fulfilled in 1984. "May Day," say members of the Resistance to one another in The Handmaid's Tale, "M'aidez." And they do.
The most striking difference from 1984 in that The Handmaid's Tale is set not thirty-five years ahead but in the immediate future. The meat hooks, the dunces' caps, the punitive amputations, the death-camps, the Salvagings, have happened, are happening, in Italy, China, Iran, Germany, the Philippines, all about us (Bosnia and Rwanda were yet to come, in 1984). As an active supporter of Amnesty International, Margaret Atwood knows that well. She wrote in "The Arrest of the Stockbroker,"
Reading the papers, you've seen it all:
the device for tearing out fingernails,
the motors, the accessories,
what can be done with the common pin.
Not to mention the wives and children.12
In fact, The Handmaid's Tale begins where 1984 leaves off. Instead of charting the destruction of a rebel, it shows a victim learning to survive. For as Atwood wrote in her book about Canadian literature, Survival, "if you are determined to be a victim, that's exactly what you will be."13 Canadians, she says, are victims in the face of a hostile wilderness and an overbearing neighbor, powerless, amputating themselves in order to survive (33). They are Rapunzels trapped in towers, their fists in their mouths, when they should be Dianas and Venuses making jail-breaks from underground (210, 246).
To express this idea, Atwood picks up Orwell's image of a woman singing a song of love (which he in his turn may have found in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), coarsened like an over-ripe turnip by years of child-bearing, but beautiful (347). Alongside a tightly-woven complex of images concerning amputation, mutilation and silencing she sets another, when from Orwell's turnip-woman she evolves a subtext of hope, an imagery of eggs and bulbs and new birth into chalice-shaped, blood-red tulips. Even the torn-apart man resembles a misshapen tuber (43)--one recalls the bulbs locked up in Mr. Pumblechook's drawers in Great Expectations, awaiting their liberation day. The female Underground lives; the fertility myths prove true. Offred, who may be pregnant, will escape to Canada, just as Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin sprang across the river with her child, and was helped to safety on the other side.
The Handmaid is indeed a Rapunzel in a tower, veiled, self-silenced, long-haired like Alice in a world of distorting fish-eye mirrors. But in this version of the tale Nick has no rose, no lute (30), and she herself will break out. She is an Everywoman, the collective heroine who, says Atwood in Survival, makes a halting but authentic breakthrough even when almost hopelessly trapped (245). She does so with the help of Nick; dark, secretive, sensual Nick, Old Nick, the agent of subversion rising up from underground. He is Orwell's irrepressible spirit of Man, who says to civilizations founded on fear and hatred and cruelty, "Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you," as Winston manages to say (391-92). Both authors seem to believe that novelists disseminate critical thought and values more powerfully than teachers in formal institutions of learning, for if Orwell had meant to sound a warning by discrediting both totalitarian-minded and time-serving intellectuals, as Crick puts it (127-28), Atwood's epilogue shows that trahison de clercs in action. Here academics meeting in conference betray Offred by their obsession with form not content, their misogyny, their tolerance of evil in the name of objectivity, their triviality and their concern for their own prestige and pleasure. They are, most painfully, us.
So what is Atwood doing in The Handmaid's Tale? 1984 provided her with raw materials, simply. As Northrop Frye has argued in The Anatomy of Criticism, books are inevitably made out of other books.14 Orwell himself had worked from (among others) Swift. In the A-vocabulary of Newspeak for instance, words are ridiculously made to stand for one thing only as in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels.15 Atwood selects an epigraph from Swift's Modest Proposal for The Handmaid's Tale as if to acknowledge their common debt. Like Swift, she exaggerates and satirizes to show that our world, taken to logical conclusions, would prove insane. The mantle of Swift's saeva indignatio passes to Orwell, and Atwood calls on both their authorities to enlarge the weight of hers. If Gérard Genette writes of Proust's "palimpsest," in which "several figures and several meanings are merged and tangled together, all present together at all times, and which can only be deciphered together, in their inextricable totality,"16 Orwell's book is still visible in Atwood's palimpsest. To enhance the conviction of her own already powerful book, she makes us remember 1984.
Walter Jackson Bate's burden of the past, Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's assertion that Freudian anxiety lies especially heavily on women writers: none of these theories applies readily to Atwood. Nor is "intertextuality" accurate in telling what she does. Orwell is not simply a source, an influence, a passive and inevitable invasion of her brain and text. Not genre, not convention, not the Zeitgeist wrote this book, but Atwood. The author lives. Her active and uninhibited appropriation of a predecessor's text might be described as Renaissance inventio, or the eighteenth century's "imitation," in the sense of friendly rivalry with the past and an invitation to compare. As Howard Weinbrot explains it, recognition of the poem imitated is necessary for the reader's pleasure, or to point out new poetic directions. In his Dictionary of 1755, Johnson called imitation "a method of translating looser than paraphrase, in which modern examples and illustrations are used for ancient, or domestick, for foreign,"17 rather as Dryden has said that the translator endeavors "to write, as he supposes, that Authour would have done, had he liv'd in our Age and in our Country."18 In The Handmaid's Tale of 1984, Atwood "translated" Orwell's 1984 by recreating it in a modern context, and making it new for our time.
The Handmaid's Tale is more than a translation though; it is a metatext, a text that comments on another text. Atwood critiques Orwell for locating the origins of totalitarianism in class and among men only, and accuses him of underestimating the evil of misogyny. Mary McCarthy though Atwood's novel tamely imitative of Orwell, and could not believe that the far right was so powerful, or so destructive to women. But it is.19 The Handmaid's Tale is a re-vision, to use Adrienne Rich's word, the deliberate re-reading of old text through the lens of gender; it is taking back the power to name that Adam hugged to himself in Eden; it acknowledges the harm that patriarchy does:
Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves ... it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped us as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh.
(35)
Rich envisions utopia as woman-centered, based on women's values, and Atwood too has spoken as an essentialist feminist. She wrote once, for instance,
He said, foot, boot, order, city, fist, road, time, knife. She said, water, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood.20
But in The Handmaid's Tale she seems to re-vision Rich in her turn, for while Moira languishes in butch heaven at Jezebel's the brothel, Nick acts to rescue Offred, the Commander is to be pitied, and the fisherman sacrifices himself for Moira.
Rich thought that only women could save the world; Atwood said in a recent interview that it's time to make friends with men again.21 The matter is urgent, for as she wrote in an address for Amnesty International, we already live in a state of war "between those who would like the future to be, in the words of George Orwell, a boot grinding forever into a human face, and those who would like it to be a state of something we still dream of as freedom."22 In such a world, in such a dystopia, all hands are needed on deck.
Notes
1Geoff Hancock, "Tightrope Walking over Niagara Falls," Canadian Writers at Work (Oxford University Press, 1987), repr. in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1990), 191-220.
21984, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 291. All references will be to this edition.
3Page 390. All references are to the Fawcett Crest paperback ed. (New York, [1985] 1987).
4Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984), 169.
5Amin Malak makes this point, in "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition", Canadian Literature 112, Spring 1987, 9-16.
6Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 141.
7"Spelling," in True Stories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 64.
8Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1983), 102-03, 142.
9See my Samuel Richardson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
10On Lies, Secrets and Silences. Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
11Crick says in a note that Orwell means to show the interconnection of sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism (434).
12Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73.
13Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1973), 82.
14(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
15Crick's introduction makes a number of more general points about the Swift connection. Orwell wrote an essay on Swift in 1946.
16Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan, with an introduction by Marie-Rose Logan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 226.
17See Weinbrot's The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 14-15.
18The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), I. 184.
19New York Times Book Review (9 February 1986) I, 35. For an implicit answer to McCarthy, see Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
20"Marrying the Hangman," Selected Poems II, 23.
21Video, Once in August, National Film Board of Canada (1984).
22"Amnesty International: An Address" [1981], Margaret Atwood: Selected Critical Prose, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, 1984), 396.
Source: Jocelyn Harris, "The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984." In Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
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Source: Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.
Criticism about: Dystopias in Contemporary Literature
"The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984",
[(essay date 1999) In the following essay, Harris examines parallels between Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, asserting that Atwood's novel is a critique of George Orwell's treatment of women in his works.]
By publishing The Handmaid's Tale in 1985, Margaret Atwood openly invited comparison between her own dystopian novel and George Orwell's 1984. She herself draws the parallel when in an interview of 1986 she compares her epilogue to his:
In fact, Orwell is much more optimistic than people give him credit for. He did the same thing. He has a text at the end of 1984. Most people think the book ends when Winston comes to love Big Brother. But it doesn't. It ends with a note on Newspeak, which is written in the past tense, in standard English--which means that, at the time of writing the note, Newspeak is a thing of the past.1
Indeed, if his Winston Smith had imagined "little knots of resistance ... leaving a few records behind, so that the next generation can carry on where we leave off," the Handmaid's tapes similarly survive.2 As Atwood remarks in the same interview, "I'm an optimist. I like to show that the Third Reich, the Fourth Reich, the Fifth Reich did not last forever." By means of a recorded voice she creates the same miracle as in Shakespeare's sonnet 65, where black marks on white paper still express love: she allows the dead to speak. And although Atwood says that "writers frequently conceal things. They ... don't want them known, or they think of them as trade secrets they don't want to give away," I shall argue that she wants us to notice whenever she imitates and diverges from Orwell. Her invitation has vital theoretical implications for this author's use of allusion, and more generally for the way that books are made.
First, the similarities. Gilead, the world of The Handmaid's Tale, is recognizably Orwellian in both structure and minute detail. In both novels, a totalitarian society is divided by hierarchy; at a time of rations and austerity, only the privileged in Atwood receive real food, as in Orwell (278), and the separate orders are marked by distinctive clothing as they were in 1984, indeed as they are distinguished traditionally in utopian fiction as far back as More's use of the sumptuary laws in his Utopia. The Commander's shoes, shiny like black beetles, especially recall Orwell's definition of tyranny as the boot stepping on the human face, for ever.3
Both societies are controlled by secret police, Atwood's Eyes, and soldiers, Atwood's Angels. Spying, betrayal, arbitrary arrest and torture are all commonplace. Winston is betrayed by Charrington and O'Brien, whom he trusted; the Handmaid and her family are also betrayed, and the worst is knowing "that some other human being has wished you that much evil" (30). If Orwell's Julia is doubled over by a fist in the solar plexus and carried out like a sack (350), a man in The Handmaid's Tale is doubled over by something sharp and brutal done to him, and is carried away like a sack of mail (27). Winston and Julia are tortured; Atwood's Moira suffers the bastinado (15), and the younger nuns, who do not let go so easily, are more broken than the rest of the women (34). Deliberate incitements to blood lust hold these societies together: Orwell's Two Minutes Hate (165) and his Hate Week (157) serve the same purpose of arousal as Atwood's Wall hung with the corpses of enemies of the state. Her Prayvaganza and Salvagings, or public hangings, recall Orwell's hangings which children clamor to attend and Syme enjoys (176, 199). During the hangings the Handmaids must hold a rope coated with pitch so that their defilement is truly collective (42); Winston finds it impossible not to join in raging at Goldstein (168). Atwood's Particicution, in which helping to tear a man to death makes the Handmaid as hungry as a horse (44), arouses the participants to the same sort of bestiality as in Orwell (313). Imaginary enemies and reports of war reinforce this tribal blood lust--Jews and other nation states in Orwell, Quakers, Baptists, feminists, homosexuals, and abortionists in Atwood. The sadism that Orwell argues to be characteristic of totalitarianism hideously spreads, so that even Winston would throw acid in a child's face (305). In totalitarian Gilead, violence is always a threat or an open presence, and the thought of it arouses even the Handmaid, numbed as she is. She longs to stab the Commander, to "put my arms around him and slip the lever from the sleeve and drive the sharp end into him suddenly, between his ribs. I think about the blood coming out of him, hot as soup, sexual, over my hands" (23).
Sexual repression assists social control. O'Brien boasts in 1984, "We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman." Children are taken away at birth "as one takes eggs from a hen," he says. So too the Handmaid's daughter is torn away from her. In a society where sex is "an annual formality" for procreation only (389), Winston and Julia's love affairs necessarily becomes "a political act" (265). The Handmaid's affair with Nick is equally subversive.
Orwell famously simplifies the language in 1984 to Newspeak and Doublethink, to words stripped of all politically undesirable associations. As he writes in the Appendix, "The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible." It was designed "not to extend but to diminish the range of thought." Parts of speech are interchangeable, and negatives are formed simply by adding the prefix "un-." Thus rejects from society are "unpersons" in Orwell, and Atwood talks similarly of "Unwomen" and "Unbabies," the imperfect ones, the "shredders." Orwell's B vocabulary imposes desirable mental attitudes for political purposes, and obliterates value words such as free, honor, justice and morality. So does the official language of Gilead.
Atwood believes, as Frank Davey puts it, that all the troubles of the world are in a sense linguistic: the female Wordhoarder in her futuristic story, "The Festival of Missed Crass," speaks for her as a "custodian of language and culture, a protector and renewer of meanings."4 In her futuristic novel, Atwood demonstrates the disaster that results from the burning of books, the closing of libraries, the ban on reading and writing, and the reduction of conversation to brief, ritualized phrases of subservience. "Under his Eye," say the Handmaids, like Winston knowing that Big Brother is watching him. In this pre-literate world, shop signs replace words, often to comic effect. The "Loaves and Fishes" has nothing in it, let alone enough to feed a multitude (27), and the Handmaid asks whether it would count to read the cushion with "FAITH" stitched upon it (10). If Orwell had devised such euphemisms as "Ministry of Love" for a place of torture, "colonies" for places where homeless children are sent, and "Reclamation Centres" for labor camps (298), Atwood also uses "Colonies" for places of death rather than new life, and "Salvaging" for hanging. Of course, both authors remember Nazi Germany, while "Salvaging" is a piece of Doublespeak actually invented in the Philippines, as her epilogue makes clear. In Orwell, class threatens individual identity; in Atwood personal names are similarly replaced by those of function. Wives, Econowives and Handmaids are defined simply by their relationship to men. A woman who is simply Offred, of the Commander, is indeed the non-essential, sexual other described by Simone de Beauvoir, the object to his absolute subject.5
Along with language, both societies suppress memory, and in consequence history, truth, and choice. Winston knows that all history is a palimpsest, to be scraped clean and re-inscribed (190); O'Brien says, "You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you ... You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed" (378). Former leaders disappear along with their photograph in Orwell; a film of Offred's feminist mother is blacked out with crayon in Atwood (20). "Orthodoxy," says Syme, "means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" (202). Offred drifts as if anesthetized in an eternal present, fed and bathed like a child, like a doll, infantized. She even speaks in the present tense, and her sentences are often incomplete, or unfold in the linear, flat, affectless mode of the comma splice. But when she says of Luke, "he was, the loved. One. Is, I say Is, is, two letters, you stupid shit, can't you manage to remember it, even a short word like that?" (35), she fights to keep meaning alive, and hope.
Memory proves irrepressible in both books. Winston remembers his mother, lost in the great purge, and an affair in an unspoiled forest in a Golden Age (181-82); Offred also remembers her mother, sent to a deadly Colony for being a feminist, and looks back to a time of happiness with Luke and their daughter. Her way of recollection recalls Locke's phrase for associationism, "the hooks and eyes of memory." It hurts here to remember: as Atwood wrote in a poem elsewhere,
you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye.6
The Handmaid's associative, involuntary memory is triggered in a very Proustian way through the senses, "a reminder, like a kick," from such banal objects as a blue and white striped tea-towel (8), or the chocolate fragments on an ice cream (27). Then flood in choice, pun, variety--in short, the free play of the signifier--and with them comprehensive memory, history, truth, understanding, and at last, freedom.
"It's strange, now," [muses the Handmaid], "to think about having a job. Job. It's a funny word. It's a job for a man. Do a jobbie, they'd say to children, when they were being toilet trained. Or of dogs: he did a job on the carpet. You were supposed to hit them with rolled-up newspapers, my mother said. I can remember when there were newspapers, though I never had a dog, only cats."
"The Book of Job" (28)
Thus she works her way like a lexicographer from meaning to meaning, from the financial dependence of women to memories of newspapers to the recognition that she is persecuted and afflicted by arbitrary powers, like Job. She has named the truth.
Thus, acts of reading, remembering, and writing defy a totalitarian regime. If Winston writes "voluptuously" on the thick creamy paper of his diary (171), the Handmaid uses the same lavish word to describe her feelings when she plays Scrabble:
We play two games. Larynx, I spell. Valance. Quince. Zygote. I hold the glossy counters with their smooth edges, finger the letters. The feeling is voluptuous. This is freedom, an eyeblink of it. Limp, I spell. Gorge. What a luxury. The counters are like candies, made of peppermint, cool like that. Humbugs, those were called. I would like to put them into my mouth. They would taste also of lime. The letter C. Crisp, slightly acid on the tongue, delicious.
(23)
Words arouse her: she imagines "the Commander and me, covering each other with ink, licking it off, or making love on stacks of forbidden newsprint" (28). Holding a pen is an especially sensuous experience. It is "alive, almost, I can feel its power." When in a pleasant pun she says, "Pen Is Envy ... I envy the Commander his pen" (29), she takes issue with Freud, whose therapy worked also through association and word-play. What women want, she says, is not a penis but a pen, the power to write. Only thus can they speak to posterity, survive and tell their truths. "A word after a word / after a word is power," Atwood wrote in a poem.7
Words promise communication, and trust. If "faint scribbles on lavatory walls" (171) encourage Winston to hope for an underground resistance, "Aunt Lydia sucks" scratched on the cubicle is "like a flag waved from a hilltop in rebellion" (34). Offred is comforted too by the dog-Latin inscribed by one of her predecessors, "Nolite te bastardes carborundorum" (p. 156), don't let the bastards grind you down. Ofglen and Offred dare to let their eyes meet, to question the value of the Soul Scrolls, and in this breathtaking moment of "subversion, sedition, blasphemy, heresy, all rolled into one", they trust each other (27), and Offred learns that there is an underground. She will escape.
Winston and Offred rebel, then, by means of sexuality, memory, writing, trust, and dreams of escape: Winston devises numerous ways to break out (287); the Handmaid imagines multiple possibilities for Luke, her mother, her daughter, and herself. Even tiny details confirm the deliberate kinship between the two books, for instance the long yellow teeth of the rat which finally breaks Winston become Aunt Lydia's, while the humiliations, punishments, and petty rebellions of Orwell's public-school life are renewed in Atwood's re-education centers, which have been set up in girls' schools.
But the differences are vital too. Atwood sets her dystopia not in Orwell's socialist Britain but in the capitalist USA, at the very heart of scientific enquiry and liberal humanist education, Harvard University. Here the Puritans rebelled against British imperialism, but they also memorably oppressed. Puritan fundamentalism rules a state devastated by ecological disaster, the bitter fruit of scientific progress. The Harvard Wall, hung with corpses, reminds us of the Berlin Wall which Kennedy of Harvard visited so pointedly as a free man, for in Gilead no one is free.
Not the new invention of television, as in Orwell, but the even newer one of electronic money management has brought this dystopia about. Women have been rendered powerless simply by the withdrawal of their credit at banks. Virginia Woolf had argued in Three Guineas that the powerlessness of women derived from denial of access to education, writing, and therefore money, and she drew an explicit comparison between the exclusion of women and the exclusion of Jews, between nineteenth-century feminists fighting patriarchy and the twentieth-century need to fight Fascism. The fear that forbids freedom in a private house is connected with the public fear of the dictator, she wrote, for "the tyrannies and servilities of the one are the tyrannies and servilities of the other."8 Nor was the idea new with her. In reply to Sir Robert Filmer's justification of the divine right of kings on the analogy of husband and wife, in his Patriarcha (1680), John Locke had argued in the first of his Two Treatises of Government (1689-90) that men were entitled to rebel against unjust tyranny. And if the organization of state and family was the same, it was logical to conclude that a woman could resist her domestic king if he proved tyrannical. Locke in fact says that there were two curses laid upon women, pain in childbirth and obedience to their husbands. Having urged women to avoid pain in childbirth if they could, he stopped just short of recommending they disobey their husbands by recollecting the force of custom. But others saw where his train of thought was leading, and the idea of the family as a domestic monarchy was made much of by Restoration dramatists, women writers of the eighteenth century, and most powerfully Samuel Richardson, in Pamela and Clarissa.9
In his time Orwell also knew that private and public words were linked, that men could be "little Stalins, little Hitlers" to other men, as Crick puts it (122), but he did not extend this important insight to men's hierarchy over women. Atwood seems to agree with Woolf that gender, not class, is the source of tyranny, and thus casts her vote against Orwell in the debate identified by Adrienne Rich, as to "whether an oppressive economic class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in fact patriarchy--the domination of males--is the original model of oppression on which all are based."10
The source of women's oppression is misogyny, and Atwood criticizes Winston's hatred of women by her differences. He thinks his wife Katherine has "the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered," and complains that in the sexual act she "would lie there with shut eyes, neither resisting nor co-operating but submitting. It was extraordinarily embarrassing, and after a while, horrible" (213-14). Atwood comments on this "frigid little ceremony" (270) when she elaborates it into her own grotesque, ritualized "Ceremony." As the Commander couples mechanically with the Handmaid, Atwood, unlike Orwell, makes us feel for the woman who passively lies there. And where Julia's instant responsiveness is a male fantasy come true (264-65)--Winston is excited by Julia's "improvement" by cosmetics, her womanly longing for a frock, for silk stockings and high heeled shoes (279)--the Handmaid's tawdry dress, "absurdly high heels" and smeared makeup serve only to mark the pathetic dreams of the Commander (300). Winston may think himself intellectually superior to Julia, but from Orwell's hints that she swears, and laughs during the Two Minutes Hate (289), Atwood would develop Moira, the bravest, the most boisterous of all the Handmaids.
Winston dreams avidly of rape and murder (169);11 the Handmaid is haunted by her memories of snuff movies and pornography, because she knows how they threaten her. And if Winston thinks women are sexual objects, stupid, and only rebellious from the waist down (291), Offred's persistent imaging of the separation of the heads from bodies as hateful, for instance, when the hanging sheet at the doctor's "intersects" her (11), shows Atwood thinking perhaps of Descartes. Her female protagonist is not a sex object, but a thinking subject, whose head and body are one. But Atwood's most defiant answer to the misogyny of 1984 is to make a woman the center of narrative consciousness. Where Orwell spoke as an author, authoritatively, using the omniscient voice, this heroine speaks directly to us. Like Chaucer, whom Atwood's title deliberately invokes, she allows her character to speak for herself.
And where Winston was betrayed by the Brotherhood, Nick and Offred's "sisters" befriend her and help her along the Underground Female-road. Winston and Julia thought only of themselves, at the end: "the proper thing was to kill yourself before they got you" (244); but Offred's predecessor wrote a message of encouragement before she hanged herself, and Ofglen dies in order that Offred may live. "She saw the van coming for her. It was better," says the new, replacement Ofglen (44). Orwell believed that mutual trust was the sole foundation for democracy, but his hope was not fulfilled in 1984. "May Day," say members of the Resistance to one another in The Handmaid's Tale, "M'aidez." And they do.
The most striking difference from 1984 in that The Handmaid's Tale is set not thirty-five years ahead but in the immediate future. The meat hooks, the dunces' caps, the punitive amputations, the death-camps, the Salvagings, have happened, are happening, in Italy, China, Iran, Germany, the Philippines, all about us (Bosnia and Rwanda were yet to come, in 1984). As an active supporter of Amnesty International, Margaret Atwood knows that well. She wrote in "The Arrest of the Stockbroker,"
Reading the papers, you've seen it all:
the device for tearing out fingernails,
the motors, the accessories,
what can be done with the common pin.
Not to mention the wives and children.12
In fact, The Handmaid's Tale begins where 1984 leaves off. Instead of charting the destruction of a rebel, it shows a victim learning to survive. For as Atwood wrote in her book about Canadian literature, Survival, "if you are determined to be a victim, that's exactly what you will be."13 Canadians, she says, are victims in the face of a hostile wilderness and an overbearing neighbor, powerless, amputating themselves in order to survive (33). They are Rapunzels trapped in towers, their fists in their mouths, when they should be Dianas and Venuses making jail-breaks from underground (210, 246).
To express this idea, Atwood picks up Orwell's image of a woman singing a song of love (which he in his turn may have found in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway), coarsened like an over-ripe turnip by years of child-bearing, but beautiful (347). Alongside a tightly-woven complex of images concerning amputation, mutilation and silencing she sets another, when from Orwell's turnip-woman she evolves a subtext of hope, an imagery of eggs and bulbs and new birth into chalice-shaped, blood-red tulips. Even the torn-apart man resembles a misshapen tuber (43)--one recalls the bulbs locked up in Mr. Pumblechook's drawers in Great Expectations, awaiting their liberation day. The female Underground lives; the fertility myths prove true. Offred, who may be pregnant, will escape to Canada, just as Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin sprang across the river with her child, and was helped to safety on the other side.
The Handmaid is indeed a Rapunzel in a tower, veiled, self-silenced, long-haired like Alice in a world of distorting fish-eye mirrors. But in this version of the tale Nick has no rose, no lute (30), and she herself will break out. She is an Everywoman, the collective heroine who, says Atwood in Survival, makes a halting but authentic breakthrough even when almost hopelessly trapped (245). She does so with the help of Nick; dark, secretive, sensual Nick, Old Nick, the agent of subversion rising up from underground. He is Orwell's irrepressible spirit of Man, who says to civilizations founded on fear and hatred and cruelty, "Something will defeat you. Life will defeat you," as Winston manages to say (391-92). Both authors seem to believe that novelists disseminate critical thought and values more powerfully than teachers in formal institutions of learning, for if Orwell had meant to sound a warning by discrediting both totalitarian-minded and time-serving intellectuals, as Crick puts it (127-28), Atwood's epilogue shows that trahison de clercs in action. Here academics meeting in conference betray Offred by their obsession with form not content, their misogyny, their tolerance of evil in the name of objectivity, their triviality and their concern for their own prestige and pleasure. They are, most painfully, us.
So what is Atwood doing in The Handmaid's Tale? 1984 provided her with raw materials, simply. As Northrop Frye has argued in The Anatomy of Criticism, books are inevitably made out of other books.14 Orwell himself had worked from (among others) Swift. In the A-vocabulary of Newspeak for instance, words are ridiculously made to stand for one thing only as in the third voyage of Gulliver's Travels.15 Atwood selects an epigraph from Swift's Modest Proposal for The Handmaid's Tale as if to acknowledge their common debt. Like Swift, she exaggerates and satirizes to show that our world, taken to logical conclusions, would prove insane. The mantle of Swift's saeva indignatio passes to Orwell, and Atwood calls on both their authorities to enlarge the weight of hers. If Gérard Genette writes of Proust's "palimpsest," in which "several figures and several meanings are merged and tangled together, all present together at all times, and which can only be deciphered together, in their inextricable totality,"16 Orwell's book is still visible in Atwood's palimpsest. To enhance the conviction of her own already powerful book, she makes us remember 1984.
Walter Jackson Bate's burden of the past, Harold Bloom's anxiety of influence, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's assertion that Freudian anxiety lies especially heavily on women writers: none of these theories applies readily to Atwood. Nor is "intertextuality" accurate in telling what she does. Orwell is not simply a source, an influence, a passive and inevitable invasion of her brain and text. Not genre, not convention, not the Zeitgeist wrote this book, but Atwood. The author lives. Her active and uninhibited appropriation of a predecessor's text might be described as Renaissance inventio, or the eighteenth century's "imitation," in the sense of friendly rivalry with the past and an invitation to compare. As Howard Weinbrot explains it, recognition of the poem imitated is necessary for the reader's pleasure, or to point out new poetic directions. In his Dictionary of 1755, Johnson called imitation "a method of translating looser than paraphrase, in which modern examples and illustrations are used for ancient, or domestick, for foreign,"17 rather as Dryden has said that the translator endeavors "to write, as he supposes, that Authour would have done, had he liv'd in our Age and in our Country."18 In The Handmaid's Tale of 1984, Atwood "translated" Orwell's 1984 by recreating it in a modern context, and making it new for our time.
The Handmaid's Tale is more than a translation though; it is a metatext, a text that comments on another text. Atwood critiques Orwell for locating the origins of totalitarianism in class and among men only, and accuses him of underestimating the evil of misogyny. Mary McCarthy though Atwood's novel tamely imitative of Orwell, and could not believe that the far right was so powerful, or so destructive to women. But it is.19 The Handmaid's Tale is a re-vision, to use Adrienne Rich's word, the deliberate re-reading of old text through the lens of gender; it is taking back the power to name that Adam hugged to himself in Eden; it acknowledges the harm that patriarchy does:
Re-vision--the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction--is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves ... it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of literature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped us as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name--and therefore live--afresh.
(35)
Rich envisions utopia as woman-centered, based on women's values, and Atwood too has spoken as an essentialist feminist. She wrote once, for instance,
He said, foot, boot, order, city, fist, road, time, knife. She said, water, willow, rope hair, earth belly, cave, meat, shroud, open, blood.20
But in The Handmaid's Tale she seems to re-vision Rich in her turn, for while Moira languishes in butch heaven at Jezebel's the brothel, Nick acts to rescue Offred, the Commander is to be pitied, and the fisherman sacrifices himself for Moira.
Rich thought that only women could save the world; Atwood said in a recent interview that it's time to make friends with men again.21 The matter is urgent, for as she wrote in an address for Amnesty International, we already live in a state of war "between those who would like the future to be, in the words of George Orwell, a boot grinding forever into a human face, and those who would like it to be a state of something we still dream of as freedom."22 In such a world, in such a dystopia, all hands are needed on deck.
Notes
1Geoff Hancock, "Tightrope Walking over Niagara Falls," Canadian Writers at Work (Oxford University Press, 1987), repr. in Margaret Atwood: Conversations, ed. Earl G. Ingersoll (Princeton, New Jersey: Ontario Review Press, 1990), 191-220.
21984, ed. Bernard Crick (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 291. All references will be to this edition.
3Page 390. All references are to the Fawcett Crest paperback ed. (New York, [1985] 1987).
4Margaret Atwood: A Feminist Poetics (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1984), 169.
5Amin Malak makes this point, in "Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition", Canadian Literature 112, Spring 1987, 9-16.
6Margaret Atwood, Selected Poems (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), 141.
7"Spelling," in True Stories (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1981), 64.
8Three Guineas (New York: Harcourt Brace & World, 1983), 102-03, 142.
9See my Samuel Richardson, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
10On Lies, Secrets and Silences. Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
11Crick says in a note that Orwell means to show the interconnection of sadism, masochism, success worship, power worship, nationalism and totalitarianism (434).
12Selected Poems II: Poems Selected and New 1976-1986 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986), 73.
13Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature (Toronto: Anansi, 1973), 82.
14(Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957).
15Crick's introduction makes a number of more general points about the Swift connection. Orwell wrote an essay on Swift in 1946.
16Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan, with an introduction by Marie-Rose Logan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 226.
17See Weinbrot's The Formal Strain: Studies in Augustan Imitation and Satire (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1969) 14-15.
18The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), I. 184.
19New York Times Book Review (9 February 1986) I, 35. For an implicit answer to McCarthy, see Susan Faludi's Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991).
20"Marrying the Hangman," Selected Poems II, 23.
21Video, Once in August, National Film Board of Canada (1984).
22"Amnesty International: An Address" [1981], Margaret Atwood: Selected Critical Prose, (Boston: Beacon Press, 1982, 1984), 396.
Source: Jocelyn Harris, "The Handmaid's Tale as a Re-Visioning of 1984." In Transformations of Utopia: Changing Views of the Perfect Society, edited by George Slusser, Paul Alkon, Roger Gaillard, and Danièle Chatelain, pp. 267-79. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1999.
Gale Database: Contemporary Literary Criticism
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Sunday, February 13, 2011
Book Choice Submission
1. The Handmaid's Tale; Margaret Atwood; Published in 1985; 277 pages.
2. I chose The Handmaid's Tale because, it had great recommendations and I looked up a few reviews and the plot summary and it caught my interest. I believe reading this novel could benefit my knowledge and understanding of greater aspects in society, as well as with other topics discussed in class. I found themes of power, feminism, sexuality and ones place in society intriguing.
3. From what I have read so far, the book is a bit bland and emotionless. It starts out with a lot of detached detail about her surroundings and it doesn't really focus a lot on the information about whom she is or where she falls in the story yet. I find that the beginning of the novel drags on with the impassive aspects of her daily routine but I haven't read far enough for it to really liven up to me.
4. I have not gotten very far in my novel yet, I just received it, and have not had very much time to read it. I have gone through the first few chapters (up to about chapter 5). I read it at night and in my MSIP if I have time.
5. So far in the novel, a woman has described how her and a bunch of other women slept in what had once been a gymnasium. She goes into detail about how the gym looks, and smells. The women take walks around the football feild - which is fenced in by barbed wire, twice daily. While out on their walks they are watched over by gaurds called angels. At night, since the woman are not allowed to talk they have learnt how to lip-read and they exchange names. The storyline changes to the present and she is now in a room with only a chair, a table, a lamp, a single bed, two white curtains, a framed picture with no glass, and a window. The window opens only part way and the doors do not lock or shut all the way. The narrator is a handmaid, and all handmaid's dress in red, excluding the white wings that frame their faces. There are servants called "Marthas" who wear only green
and the commanders wives all dress in blue. She sometimes listens in on Rita and Cora's (Marthas) conversations because she cannot form a relationship with them. She then collects tokens from Rita to go shopping. While she is leaving she rekindles the memory of the first time she met the commanders wife. She had told her to keep out of sight and that the commander was her husband forever and permanently. At that moment she recognizes who the commanders wife really is - Serena Joy, a singer from the sunday morning gospel program. As she walks out she sees a Gaurdian who winks at her, she ignores it because she fears he may be an eye (someone testing her). she then waits for another handmaid - Ofglen, at the corner because handmaids must travel in pairs. They meet and exchange conversation, at the checkpoint they are greeted by two young Gaurdians. The younger Gaurdians are usually the more dangerous, one shot a martha because he taught she was a man in disguise with a bomb. Leaving the gaurds at gate she subtley teases them with her walk. She thinks about how they must be craving sex because of the fact that they cannot masturbate, marry without permission, and porn magazines and movies are forbidden. The gaurdians hope to one day become angels and get the privalige to marry eventually get a handmaid of their own. While they wait in line, she recalls the days when the Republic of Gilead was not protected and the women were not to open the door to strangers and ingnore the comments from men on the street; now touches or talks to the women. The stores in the town are marked by pictures of food, the lettered signs are to tempting. A pregnant handmaid walked in the store and roared up excitment, it's expected that she is only out to show off her pregnancy. She then thinks of her husband and their daughter and their before life. After they finished shopping they started to walk back when they encountered a group of Japense tourists and their interpreter who asks the handmaid's for a picture. In suspiscion of being an Eye, they decline and stare in awe at how the women are dressed. The interpreter then asks if they are happy, she replies yes, very happy.
6. Some of the themes being shown so far are feminism, power, and sextuality. For the theme of power i believe Margaret Atwood is trying to say that there is a great presence of power and munipluation within the population. There is a higher power controlling everything. In the theme of feminism, it is clearly a feminist society - the women are greatly respected. Especially in comparison to the way the narrator compares how the Repbulic of Gilead is now and how it used to be. Sex and sexuality seems to be contained and controlled by the government, there is no sexual clothing aloud, no pornographic films or magazines. It feels as though they are trying to separate sex from sexuality.
7. I have not yet found any secondary sources on this book.
8."There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." - Chapter 5, page 24.
This passage from The Handmaid's Tale spoke to me becuase, it made me think. Although, they are in a time of oppression and restriction they are proctected and given a right more so than they think. Aunt Lydia says "Now you are given freedom from. Don't underrate it." this statement made me think about how even when you feel as though you have had your rights taken away from you, you have to look at the bright side because it could be worse. It makes me think of a lot about the third world countries that are like this, where they are resrticted by their government and they have to just go with it. You could have the freedom to do something or you could have the freedom from something but you could think of it as the freedom from, being harmed or violated in the sense of this novel.
2. I chose The Handmaid's Tale because, it had great recommendations and I looked up a few reviews and the plot summary and it caught my interest. I believe reading this novel could benefit my knowledge and understanding of greater aspects in society, as well as with other topics discussed in class. I found themes of power, feminism, sexuality and ones place in society intriguing.
3. From what I have read so far, the book is a bit bland and emotionless. It starts out with a lot of detached detail about her surroundings and it doesn't really focus a lot on the information about whom she is or where she falls in the story yet. I find that the beginning of the novel drags on with the impassive aspects of her daily routine but I haven't read far enough for it to really liven up to me.
4. I have not gotten very far in my novel yet, I just received it, and have not had very much time to read it. I have gone through the first few chapters (up to about chapter 5). I read it at night and in my MSIP if I have time.
5. So far in the novel, a woman has described how her and a bunch of other women slept in what had once been a gymnasium. She goes into detail about how the gym looks, and smells. The women take walks around the football feild - which is fenced in by barbed wire, twice daily. While out on their walks they are watched over by gaurds called angels. At night, since the woman are not allowed to talk they have learnt how to lip-read and they exchange names. The storyline changes to the present and she is now in a room with only a chair, a table, a lamp, a single bed, two white curtains, a framed picture with no glass, and a window. The window opens only part way and the doors do not lock or shut all the way. The narrator is a handmaid, and all handmaid's dress in red, excluding the white wings that frame their faces. There are servants called "Marthas" who wear only green
and the commanders wives all dress in blue. She sometimes listens in on Rita and Cora's (Marthas) conversations because she cannot form a relationship with them. She then collects tokens from Rita to go shopping. While she is leaving she rekindles the memory of the first time she met the commanders wife. She had told her to keep out of sight and that the commander was her husband forever and permanently. At that moment she recognizes who the commanders wife really is - Serena Joy, a singer from the sunday morning gospel program. As she walks out she sees a Gaurdian who winks at her, she ignores it because she fears he may be an eye (someone testing her). she then waits for another handmaid - Ofglen, at the corner because handmaids must travel in pairs. They meet and exchange conversation, at the checkpoint they are greeted by two young Gaurdians. The younger Gaurdians are usually the more dangerous, one shot a martha because he taught she was a man in disguise with a bomb. Leaving the gaurds at gate she subtley teases them with her walk. She thinks about how they must be craving sex because of the fact that they cannot masturbate, marry without permission, and porn magazines and movies are forbidden. The gaurdians hope to one day become angels and get the privalige to marry eventually get a handmaid of their own. While they wait in line, she recalls the days when the Republic of Gilead was not protected and the women were not to open the door to strangers and ingnore the comments from men on the street; now touches or talks to the women. The stores in the town are marked by pictures of food, the lettered signs are to tempting. A pregnant handmaid walked in the store and roared up excitment, it's expected that she is only out to show off her pregnancy. She then thinks of her husband and their daughter and their before life. After they finished shopping they started to walk back when they encountered a group of Japense tourists and their interpreter who asks the handmaid's for a picture. In suspiscion of being an Eye, they decline and stare in awe at how the women are dressed. The interpreter then asks if they are happy, she replies yes, very happy.
6. Some of the themes being shown so far are feminism, power, and sextuality. For the theme of power i believe Margaret Atwood is trying to say that there is a great presence of power and munipluation within the population. There is a higher power controlling everything. In the theme of feminism, it is clearly a feminist society - the women are greatly respected. Especially in comparison to the way the narrator compares how the Repbulic of Gilead is now and how it used to be. Sex and sexuality seems to be contained and controlled by the government, there is no sexual clothing aloud, no pornographic films or magazines. It feels as though they are trying to separate sex from sexuality.
7. I have not yet found any secondary sources on this book.
8."There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." - Chapter 5, page 24.
This passage from The Handmaid's Tale spoke to me becuase, it made me think. Although, they are in a time of oppression and restriction they are proctected and given a right more so than they think. Aunt Lydia says "Now you are given freedom from. Don't underrate it." this statement made me think about how even when you feel as though you have had your rights taken away from you, you have to look at the bright side because it could be worse. It makes me think of a lot about the third world countries that are like this, where they are resrticted by their government and they have to just go with it. You could have the freedom to do something or you could have the freedom from something but you could think of it as the freedom from, being harmed or violated in the sense of this novel.
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